Digital Exploration of Lute Tablature Agencies. Re-reading the creative practitioners of sixteenth-century intabulations

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Irene Holzer
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566619279

DELTA will convene a group of interdisciplinary experts, covering musicology, digital scholarship, music encoding, and Linked Data. Using new developments in these fields, we will re-read lute arrangements of vocal music - intabulations - as products of artistic, social, analytical and pragmatic processes that connect the written music to a wider context of musical cross-reference, culture and music theory. This context can itself be seen as a network of different agencies, something which we will explore through new approaches to digital musicology. For lute music in the sixteenth century, the act of intabulation - arranging a polyphonic score for a single instrument - was a recognized art, with arrangements by famous virtuoso lutenists such as Francesco da Milano as well as by amateur musicians reaching wide audiences through widespread print editions. Treatises and prints by authors such as Adrian Le Roy explored the process of intabulation and, in doing so, distinguished the mechanical task from an artistic 'more finely handled' stage. Humanists such as Hans Heinrich Herwart collected prints and manuscripts and studied the music of the time through intabulations. These different activities and agents will be reframed by comprehensively studying the act of intabulation from the perspective of a network of composers, 'intabulators', collectors, printers, and scholars. DELTA will study both the intabulation process as an artistic and pragmatic activity, and also the intellectual role of intabulations as a way of understanding polyphony in a period where scores in the modern sense were unavailable. This re-reading will be carried out through three focussed musicological case studies, each of which will produce encoded musical data as well as written scholarship. Alongside new data, DELTA will revitalize three important digital corpora of lute music which are foundational to our research. Following FAIR principles, we will convert their encodings to modern standards and publish them sustainably, and enhance discoverability by adding them to the RISM Online platform. Our reading of intabulations as agencies between printer, collector, and musician will inform, in close alignment with our musicology, the development of Digital Companions - incorporating notation, virtual fingerboard, video recordings and other contextual information, with novel modes for their presentation. This will enhance our own exploration of the material, while also bringing otherwise inaccessible lute tablature to a wider audience. They will enable a user to see, hear, and understand the intabulation process more clearly along with the relationship between multiple intabulations of the same work, and the vocal models they are built on, allowing them to be active participants in a literal re-reading.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partners: David Lewis; Dr. Kevin Page