Review: Music Encoding Initiative

Abstract

Music Encoding Initiative. Johannes Kepper, Administrative Chair. URL: http://music-encoding.org/ It will not have escaped the notice of many readers of this Journal that a number of ambitious projects in historical musicology with a major IT component have received generous grant funding in recent years. Underpinning each of these projects is the music-encoding standard known as the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). Examples include a pair of projects primarily devoted to opera. Freischutz Digital is an online critical edition involving all the significant textual and musical sources of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz (first performed in 1821),1 and forming part of a projected complete online Weber edition.2 With its bewildering variety of versions, translations, and adaptations, it proves a severe test for the notion of a definitive and fixed operatic “work concept.” Similar complexities plague the online critical editions of three operas by Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802),3 which form the centerpiece of a musicological project dealing with a less familiar, and possibly unreasonably neglected, historical figure. In contrast to these opera editions, which use data from several different documents as the basis for an online edition of …