Abstract
Abstract The Felix Meritis Concert Programs Database 1832–1888 (fmcp Database) provides a full digitisation of the concert programs collection of the most long-standing Dutch concert hall in the nineteenth century: Felix Meritis. Formerly hidden in boxes with archival ephemera, the content of this collection is now unlocked by manually entering the program details into a searchable dataset. The programs give an extremely rich account of a local concert practice, the performed repertoire, and the musicians involved. However, archiving concert programs at item-level presents a challenge: due to inconsistencies in and incompleteness of work descriptions it is often hard to identify and categorize the musical works performed. For the fmcp database, the authors have developed a possible solution to this problem; a strategy for structuring and categorizing concert programming data that aims to include incomplete work descriptions and reflect genre categorizations used in local concert practice. In this paper, the authors will present this categorization method and discuss the attributes and the basic structure of the fmcp database.
Highlights
Music historians have only just begun to discover the full research potential of the thousands of concert programs that are scattered across European archives and libraries (Weber, 2000; Lee, 2017; Ridgewell, 2010; Bashford, 2008; Lloyd, 2003)
Performance data is often a missing link in studies that pursue a bottom-up approach to music history: studies into socioeconomic aspects of concert life, networks, patterns of taste, local repertoires and the implications of changing musical ideas for local musical practices (e.g. Pasler, 1993; Johnson, 1995; Weber, 2001 and 2009; Hall-Witt, 2007; Bashford, 2008; English, 2014)
In order to systematically analyze and categorize the repertoire in the fmcp Database, we developed a genre categorization method that reproduces the genre indications used on the actual programs
Summary
Music historians have only just begun to discover the full research potential of the thousands of concert programs that are scattered across European archives and libraries (Weber, 2000; Lee, 2017; Ridgewell, 2010; Bashford, 2008; Lloyd, 2003). Based on principles from literary genre theory (Todorov, 1990; Jauss, 1982; Frow, 2007; Dubrow, 2014; Hernadi, 1972) we developed a strategy for structuring and categorizing concert programming data in a manner that reflects the locality and temporality research data journal for the humanities and socialDoswcniloeandecdefrsom B(r2ill0.c2o0m)116/022-/728021 12:37:48PM via free access van Nieuwkerk, Nijboer and Kisjes of the genre categorizations used on the programs Before we explain this further, let us first introduce the database; a fully-searchable digital transcription of the concert programs collection of the most long-standing Dutch concert hall in the nineteenth century: Felix Meritis
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