Prospects for a Big Data History of Music

This position paper sets out the possibility of a musicology based on the analysis of musical-bibliographical metadata as Big Data. It outlines the work underway, as part of the AHRC-funded project A Big Data History of Music, to align seven major datasets of musical-bibliographical metadata. After discussing some of the technical challenges of data alignment, it suggests how analysis and visualization of this data might transform musicological understandings of cultural transmission and canon formation

Library catalogue records as a research resource:introducing 'A Big Data History of Music'

Librarians and archivists are increasingly collecting and working with large quantities of digital data. In science, business, and now the humanities, the production and analysis of vast amounts of data (so-called ‘big data research’) have become fundamental activities. This article introduces the project A Big Data History of Music, a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Library. The project has made the British Library’s catalogue records for printed and manuscript music available as open data, and has explored how the analysis and visualisation of huge numbers of bibliographic records can open new perspectives for researchers into music history. In addition to the British Library data (over a million records), the project drew on a further million bibliographic descriptions from RISM, which have also recently been released as open data. To show the challenges posed by the heterogeneous nature of the data, the article outlines the different structures of the various catalogue records used in the project, and summarises how the British Library data was cleaned and enhanced prior to its public release. Examples are given of how music-bibliographical data can be analysed and visualised, and how scholars and citizen scientists can engage with this data through hackathons, large-scale data analyses, and database construction. It is hoped this article will encourage other research libraries to consider making their catalogue records available as open data

Shrove-tide dancing: balls and masques at Whitehall under Charles II

The tradition of the Shrove-tide court entertainment with dancing and music, strong in the first half of the seventeenth century in England, was restored with the monarchy after 1660. Shrove-tide masques, balls and plays, along with dishes of pancakes and fritters, remained a feature of the court calendar to the end of Charles II’s reign. As well as borrowing elements from the Jacobean court masque, some of the entertainments presented before Charles II were modelled on French entertainments staged for Louis XIV. John Blow’s court opera Venus and Adonis may have received its first performance at a Shrove-tide event in 1682/3

Purcell in the 18th century: music for the 'Quality, Gentry, and others'

Henry Purcell was the only composer of his generation to be honoured with performances of his music at both the Academy of Ancient Music and Concerts of Ancient Music in the 18th century. Both organizations also programmed 18th-century music for The Tempest, believing it to be by Purcell. Excerpts from Purcell’s theatre works were performed at the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club too, where the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Watkin Williams Wynn introduced much of the Purcell repertory; Sandwich was also a key figure in the promotion of Purcell’s music at the Concerts of Ancient Music. Although the Academy of Ancient Music’s instrumental parts for King Arthur do not exhibit as many signs of modernization as do their manuscripts of Dido and Aeneas, some amendments to the musical text are found there, as well as in the Catch Club’s manuscripts of Purcell’s music. Purcell’s works were generally well received by the press, and newspaper reviews provide evidence of concerts of his music taking inspiration—and sometimes performers—from the Concerts of Ancient Music. The misattributed Tempest was seemingly one of the most popular ‘Purcell’ works with late 18th-century audiences; it entered the canon and remained there until Margaret Laurie made a conclusive case against its being by Purcell, and suggested John Weldon as the likely composer. Dr Laurie has also removed 18th-century accretions from the score of King Arthur, and we are at last seeing an end to the perpetuation of 18th-century tastes and prejudices in editions of Purcell’s music

Unlocking the Wandering Minstrels’ Archive: a case study in creating a database of performances

The Wandering Minstrels Orchestra was an orchestra of noblemen and gentlemen which gave hundreds of private 'smoking concerts' in London and charity concerts across England between 1860 and 1898. Surviving scrapbooks of photographs, press cuttings, programmes, letters and drawings relating to the Minstrels, many of them now preserved at the British Library, allow the orchestra's concert-giving history to be reconstructed in great detail. In this paper I shall set out some of the challenges faced when documenting the archive and creating a database of the orchestra's performances, looking - among other things - at issues of authority control, at the FRBR model and its usefulness or otherwise in documenting musical performances, and at the potential offered by external linked data

Unlocking the Wandering Minstrels’ Archive: a case study in creating a database of performances

The Wandering Minstrels Orchestra was an orchestra of noblemen and gentlemen which gave hundreds of private 'smoking concerts' in London and charity concerts across England between 1860 and 1898. Surviving scrapbooks of photographs, press cuttings, programmes, letters and drawings relating to the Minstrels, many of them now preserved at the British Library, allow the orchestra's concert-giving history to be reconstructed in great detail. In this paper I shall set out some of the challenges faced when documenting the archive and creating a database of the orchestra's performances, looking - among other things - at issues of authority control, at the FRBR model and its usefulness or otherwise in documenting musical performances, and at the potential offered by external linked data

Bibliographic records as 'Big Data': seeking harmony in music metadata

The collaborative research project ‘A Big Data History of Music’ draws on a disparate array of music catalogues created over nearly two centuries. During that time, many different cataloguing rules have existed; national and international standards have developed for cataloguing printed materials, and, in many countries, separate protocols established for the documentation of manuscripts and archival collections. In recent years, developments from outside the library world – for instance in linked data – have also had a bearing on the way printed and manuscript music is documented. In order for meaningful results to be drawn from the combined dataset by the researchers working on ‘A Big Data History of Music’, a degree of harmonisation between the different data sources has been required. In this paper some of the difficulties of working with such disparate data sources are explored. Data from the British Library’s catalogue of printed music is being enhanced and an online version of an older printed catalogue of music manuscripts created using Optical Character Recognition. In some instances, it has been possible to find automated solutions to the problems; in others, music specialists have been called upon to enhance the data and create new access points