Beethoven in the House (2020-2023)

Until the introduction of radio and audio recordings, home music was often the only way to familiarise oneself with musical works. Yet the sheet music that forms our primary access to this culture has rarely been the subject of comprehensive methodological studies. The decisions of the arrangers who adapted the music for domestic consumption - in terms of instrumentation, shortening and/or simplification - reflect 19th century musical life and thus provide us with an insight that complements other contemporary sources such as newspapers, adverts and diaries.

The project was funded by the Musicology Department Detmold-Paderborn (Director: Johannes Kepper, Research Associate: Marc Saccomano), the e-Research Centre of the University of Oxford (Director: Kevin Page, Research Associate: David Lewis), the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Director: Andrew Hankinson) and the Beethoven Archive (Director: Christine Siegert, Research Associates: Elisabete Shibata, October-November 2020 Christin Heitmann) and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Two studies are to be produced as part of the project: One is dedicated to the editions of Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies and Wellington's Victory published by the Viennese publisher Steiner; on the basis of a detailed comparison between the arrangements, a common ‘core’ of the arrangements is to be systematically identified. A second study attempts to identify typical features of this music industry of the time in a corpus of lesser-known and often poorly catalogued arrangements.

The studies convert arrangements into music coding, using new approaches to partially capture only the relevant parts of the notation or annotations. Optical Music Recognition (OMR) and Linked Open Data (LOD) help to gain and structure new insights. The results are digitally processed in such a way that both methods and research data are generally usable for digital musicology and digital humanities, see https://domestic-beethoven.eu/.

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, project number 429039809.

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