Future plans

Athanasius Kircher on birdsong *

The original aim of the TML was to give access to early music treatises, from print publications and manuscripts, in electronic versions faithful to the originals, and to help locate terms within such corpus. After migrating all texts and metadata to a new architecture and adding new metadata (2017), the preparation of new texts for inclusion in the archive has restarted. Plans are already in place to provide graphics at a higher resolution; to add more concordances and links with other resources; and to populate the individual texts with new comments. At the same time, work on the website will proceed to further improve its usability: to re-format longer treatises, which are presented as separate texts, into a single one; to create an index of authors proper; and to make available a search utility allowing for more powerful (and flexible) queries, considering a corpus of texts full of inflected and inconsistently spelled terms.

Moreover, the TML will strive to expand the scope of the project, on the one hand documenting and making available a larger spectrum of materials, and on the other hand developing a space for scholarly contributions in the field of the history of early music theory. A few sub-projects have already started (thanks to an internal grant from Indiana University and the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) the first results of which we hope to make available soon, including:

• a companion website making available the entire content of monumental first modern editions of music treatises, starting with Martin Gerbert’s Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra (1784) and Charles Edmond de Coussemaker’s Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series (1864-76). Facsimiles and the full text, including footnotes and apparatus will be available for each volume, along with a new commentary and introduction.
• alternative reading views available for selected texts, with text enriched with annotations and music examples displayed inline. These will constitute a preview of a future edition of the TML featuring text and music encoded in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and MEI (Music Encoding Initiative), the full delivery of which will depend on availability of funds.
• ancillary materials such as original entries on authors, central treatises, manuscript sources, including cross-references to other resources, also co-hosted in partnership with research libraries; editions of literary texts and musical pieces quoted (as part of a project on ‘Citation in music treatises’).