Music and Digital Humanities

Reconstructing Renaissance Improvisation Pedagogy using Symbolic Music Analysis Tools and Practice-Informed Analysis with Frauke Jürgensen

The Distinguished Lecture Series Music and Digital Humanities at mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna invites leading international experts in diverse aspects of DH to share their perspectives with our students, faculty, and community. The series is aimed at a broad, non-technical audience. It provides a varied overview of the history and current state of DH as it applies to music, its philosophical underpinnings and societal implications, and is expected to yield insights into relevant methodologies, technologies, infrastructures, and applications working with humanities datasets.

Topics include data management and computational analysis for digital musicology, digital editions, DH and artificial intelligence, machine learning and music information retrieval, as well as pedagogy, science communication, and citizen science. The series is convened by Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl, digital musicology researchers at the mdw's Department for Music Acoustics — Wiener Klangstil, and organized in collaboration with the mdw's Department of Musicology and Performance Studies.

Lectures will be presented in English.

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This project is funded by CLARIAH-AT with support from the BMFWF.

Programm

Symbolic analysis involves representing music through symbols such as letters and numbers, which can then be processed by a computer using the same type of pattern matching tools that one might use to process plain text-based data sets. This approach has a long history within computer-aided music analysis, and Renaissance music has been central since the 1970s and earlier (see Trowbridge et al.). More lately, machine learning approaches have been a natural expansion. The types of questions that are asked in such studies tend to involve identifying patterns of repetition, for example of compositional structures, musica ficta, ornamental patterns. In recent years, within the field of Early Music performance and compositional practice, the reconstruction of improvisation techniques has been an important area, transforming our understanding of the importance of improvisation pedagogy to the development of compositional technique and style. Treatises and collections of exercises are essential sources, as is analysis of composed pieces for the identification of improvisational models. Unfortunately, the largest collection of exercises for keyboard improvisation of the fifteenth century, the fundamenta and associated pieces of the Buxheim Organ Book, is not accompanied by written instructions for their use. From sixteenth-century sources such as Buchner's Fundamentum, we have an idea how to begin, but the intervening decades and structural differences mean that we cannot simply transplant the later set of instructions onto the earlier exercises. I approach this problem from two directions: through conventional and computer-aided analysis, I search for patterns of repetition that might suggest underlying schemata, while systematic practicing at the keyboard helps me both identify which analytic questions might be the most useful, and allows me to test hypotheses about the pedagogical process that emerge through the analyses.

Frauke Jürgensen, Professor of Music Theory in the Institute for Composition Studies and Music Production at the mdw, is a musician and musicologist. One of her main research areas is the performance and compositional practice of Renaissance music, using digital tools for music analysis. She has also translated a number of treatises, and is active as a singer and historical keyboard player.

Further infos can be found here.