Representing Atypical Music Notation Practices: An Example with Late 17th Century Music

Abstract

From the 17th century towards the first decades of the 18th century music notation slowly looses all influences from mensural music, becoming virtually identical to what we would consider common modern notation. But in these five decades of transformation composers did not just suddenly abandon older notation styles, but they were used alongside the ones that would become standard. Void notation, black notation and uncommon tempi were all mixed together. The scholar preparing modern editions of this music is normally forced to normalize all these atypical notations as many software applications do not support them natively. This paper exemplifies the flexibility of the encoding scheme proposed by the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and of Verovio, a visualisation library designed for it. The modular approach of these tools means that particular notation systems can be easily added whilst maintaining compatibility to other encoded notations