Neue Mozart Ausgabe Online (review)

Abstract

Neue Mozart Ausgabe Online, part of the Digitate Mozart Edition. Operated by the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute. http://DME.mozarteum.at (Accessed June-September 2010). [Requires a Web browser, an Internet connection, and a PDF reader.] Complete works editions have long been an important resource for scholars and musicians. Although their high production costs have made them susceptible to shifts in academic trends and availability of funding, large critical editions continue to play an important role in twenty-first-century scholarship. Recent years have witnessed an increase in online digital collections; the C.P.E. Bach complete works is currently making performance parts of each volume available on its Web site (http://www.cpebach.org), nineteenth-century editions of Bach, Handel, and others are now available in facsimile online (made possible by the expiration of their copyright), and the Digitale Mozart Edition (DME) is at the forefront of this trend, with the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA) already completely digitized and available online. The DME has also begun to implement plans to make archival documents pertaining to Mozart's life available online, as part of their overall project to provide world wide access to the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ... [and to] include a critical edition of letters, documents and libretti as well. (1) Only the NMA Online will be discussed in this review. The content is free and open to the public for private and educational use. Commerical use is prohibited, as is wholesale reproduction of the edition. (1.) Excerpted from the DME's Project Outline on their homepage: http://DME.mozarteum.at/DME. With 126 volumes and almost 35,000 pages digitized, the NMA Online--available in German, Japanese, and English--offers numerous advantages to libraries, scholars, and musicians over printed volumes. Of great interest, lo librarians will be the ability for users to view any part of the edition, download it as a PDF file, and print a hard copy if needed. This will reduce wear and tear to printed editions and decrease use of copy and scanning equipment (as it renders reproduction of the originals unnecessary). The ability to print is useful for musicians since users can annotate their own copies of a with greater ease. This feature also makes the NMA Online a potential performance library for performers, although for now the score only format makes it impractical in this regard for the majority of Mozart's compositions. In the future, the DME plans to convert the NMA material into a format that would allow for individual performance parts to be viewed and printed. Compared to the printed edition, ease of use is greatly increased with the online version since it is searchable and browsable by a number of different criteria. Both a Kochel number and a more generic keyword search function are available. Users can also browse by genre, key, volume editor, and the original NMA organization scheme. If one were looking for the wind quintet K. 581, but didn't know the catalog number, it could be found in a number of different ways. A search for clarinet in the keyword box would yield it, as would browsing the category drop down list for Series VIII--quintets with wind instruments. Users can also find the correct volume by searching for its editor (in the case of K. 581, Ernst Schmid). Below the main search box is a listing of each series in the NMA and by clicking on any of these, users may browse a list of the volumes contained within each series, complete with information on works contained, publication date, editor, and number of pages. These search features of the NMA Online allow for many different works or volumes to be accessed simultaneously and compared on a single computer screen. Once the desired volume has been found, the user has the option of either viewing the entire NMA volume in facsimile (the by clicking on the note-head icon, the report by clicking on the text button) or proceeding to an interactive table of contents that has been created for each individual volume (by clicking the i button). …