Conceptualising a Digital Performance Edition

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Axel Berndt; Professor Dr. Andreas Münzmay
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555717918

Scholarly-critical music editions, whether traditionally analog or digital, are significant in many respects, both within musicology as well as beyond and reaching into current cultural life. Although music editions deal with written musical texts in various ways, they have so far not dealt with the phonographic tradition of music culture, which has been no less culturally influential since the beginning of media-based sound recording and storage around 1900. Their genuine editorial integration is still an urgent, open desideratum. We would like to expand the palette of music-editing approaches by adding the type of "digital performance edition" so as to create the basis for the philological indexing, systematic analysis and preparation of sounding music as an object of editing. This is done on an equal basis with their notational fixation in annotated performance scores. In this way, a bridge is created from editorial philology to performance research and to the audio media that are so influential for the musical tradition of the 20th and 21st centuries. The development of two digital performance editions envisaged in the project is intended to serve as a model and demonstrate the perspectives of insight, challenges and work processes in an exemplary manner. The first case study is Steffi Geyer's performance of Othmar Schoeck's Violin Concerto op. 21, which was released as a late shellac record in 1947. The second case study is Clifford Curzon's performance of Beethoven's "Eroica Variations" op. 35 for piano solo from 1971. Written notation and sounding music will be placed in a systematic and critical correlation. The MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) and MPM (Music Performance Markup) data formats as well as the MPM Toolbox and Sonic Visualiser software serve as the technical basis, which will be expanded and integrated in a targeted manner for the editorial requirements.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants