Despite the recasting of the web's technical capabilities through Web 2.0, conventional digital library software architectures---from which many of our leading Music Digital Libraries (MDLs) are formed---result in digital resources that are, surprisingly, disconnected from other online sources of information, and embody a "read-only" mindset. Leveraging from Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques and Linked Open Data (LOD), in this paper we demonstrate a new form of music digital library that encompasses management, discovery, delivery, and analysis of the musical content it contains. Utilizing open source tools such as Greenstone, audioDB, Meandre, and Apache Jena we present a series of transformations to a musical digital library sourced from audio files that steadily increases the level of support provided to the user for musicological study. While the seed for this work was motivated by better supporting musicologists in a digital library, the developed software architecture alters the boundaries to what is conventionally thought of as a digital library---and in doing so challenges core assumptions made in mainstream digital library software design.

A Musical Progression with Greenstone: How Music Content Analysis and Linked Data is Helping Redefine the Boundaries to a Music Digital Library

This article reconsiders the cultural significance and historical impact of the well-known virtuosic piano composition The Banjo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk Throughout the early nineteenth century, the banjo and the piano inhabited very specific and highly contrasting performance circumstances: black folk entertainment and minstrel shows for the former, white middle- and upper-class parlors and concert halls for the latter In The Banjo, Louis Moreau Gottschalk lifted the banjo out of its familiar contexts and placed it in the spaces usually privileged for the piano Taking its inspiration from both African American and minstrel banjo playing techniques, Gottschalk's composition relaxed and muddled the boundaries among performance spaces, racial and class divisions, and two conspicuously different musical instruments in an egalitarian effort to demonstrate that, contrary to the opinions of some mid-nineteenth-century musical critics and tastemakers, both the piano and the banjo have a place in the shaping of American music culture

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Porch and Playhouse, Parlor and Performance Hall: Traversing Boundaries in Gottschalk's The Banjo

Performance of a musical work potentially provides a rich source of multimedia material for future investigation, both for musicologists’ study of reception and perception, and in improvement of computational methods applied to its analysis. This is particularly true of music theatre, where a traditional recording cannot sufficiently capture the ephemeral phenomena unique to each staging. In this paper we introduce a toolkit developed with, and used by, a musicologist throughout a complete multi-day production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. The toolkit is centred on a tablet-based score interface through which the scholar makes notes on the scenic setting of the performance as it unfolds, supplemented by a variety of digital data gathered to structure and index the annotations. We report on our experience developing a system suitable for real-time use by the musicologist, structuring the data for reuse and further investigation using semantic web technologies, and of the practical challenges and compromises of fieldwork within a working theatre. Finally we consider the utility of our tooling from both a user perspective and through an initial quantitative investigation of the data gathered.

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A toolkit for live annotation of opera performance: Experiences capturing Wagner's Ring Cycle

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Best Practices for Recording Faceted Chronological Data in Bibliographic Records

Music catalogers have embraced in current cataloging the flexibility, intuitiveness, and expressivity afforded by the Library of Congress’s new faceted vocabularies. In order to realize the...

An Amicable Divorce: Programmatic Derivation of Faceted Data from Library of Congress Subject Headings for Music

The Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus (LCMPT) and the music portions of the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) are long-anticipated products in a history of problem-solving approaches toward faceted access to music resources. MLA’s Cataloging and Metadata Committee has collaborated with the Library of Congress for the past several years in a multiphase endeavor to design and build out these new vocabularies. Implementation within the Anglo-American music cataloging community began in 2014, and retrospective implementation (the programmatic assignment of faceted terms to legacy metadata) is currently being studied and pursued.

Faceted Vocabularies for Music: A New Era in Resource Discovery

International Music Score Library Project/Petrucci Music Library. Project Petrucci, LLC. http://imslp.org/wik/Main_Page (Accessed May 2010). [Requires a Web browser, Adobe Reader and an Internet connection]. The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), alternatively branded the Petrucci Music Library since its relaunch in 2008, is a non-profit project that operates within a simple yet formidable mission, stated prominently on its home page: "to create a virtual library containing all public domain music scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge." In four short years, it has progressed admirably towards this goal, becoming not only one of the largest free online collections of digitized printed music, but also one of the fastest-growing, adding on average over 2,000 scores per month. The IMSLP gained notoriety in the music community surrounding its tumultuous early history. Founder Edward W. Guo, then an undergraduate classical composition student at the New England Conservatory of Music, launched the site on 16 February 2006. As it gained popularity, it also caught the attention of a large European publisher, several of whose scores had been mounted on the site. After receiving two cease-and-desist letters from the publisher in 2007, Guo opted to shut down the site; as he stated in an open letter to the community, "the cease and desist letter does not call for a takedown of the entire site, but ... I very unfortunately simply do not have the energy or money necessary to implement the terms ... in any other way." Happily, Guo was eventually able to mitigate the complications of disparate copyright terms (as explained below), and the IMSLP was re-launched on 1 July 2008, featuring a redesigned user interface powered by MediaWiki, the interface familiar to users as that originally developed for use by Wikipedia. SCOPE OF CONTENT Housing over 61,000 scores (downloadable as PDF files) as of May 2010, the IMSLP rivals many brick-and-mortar music libraries in coverage. To wit, this figure is displayed prominently on the home page, alongside two other constantly-increasing figures: the number of works represented on the site (currently approaching 25,000) and the number of composers whose works are represented (nearly 3,300). The scope is broad, encompassing Western art music from all periods and in all genres. Understandably, as the bulk of the collection has originated from users' personal collections, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the best represented. However, a large contingent of living composers has begun to use IMSLP as a forum for disseminating their works, employing Creative Commons licenses. Such a forum effectively bypasses the commercial publishing apparatus, and uncovers a treasure trove of new music never before gathered in one virtual space. One young composer in particular, Eric Quezada (b. 1995), is surprisingly prolific, having uploaded over 200 works. To be sure, the editorial and vetting mechanisms of traditional publishing are also bypassed in this way; though submissions are monitored closely for adherence to copyright, and/or licensing requirements, no endorsement of musical quality of any particular work is put forth by the hosts of the site. Accordingly, a "discussion" tab on each work page allows members of the site to contribute commentary and analyses of specific works. Unfortunately, I have, observed that tins lab is being used more for discussions of scan quality and the like. Still, the function is there for those who might wish to share their particular ideas on Beethoven's Ninth, or to opine on a composer's latest creation. The aforementioned copyright disparities create a potentially misleading picture of score availability, as not all works are in the public domain in all geographic areas. Since IMSLP's servers are located in Canada, the baseline requirement for score submission is that the work in question be hi the public domain in Canada, which observes a copyright term of the life of the author plus 50 years. …

International Music Score Library Project, Petrucci Music Library

A Brave New (Faceted) World: Towards Full Implementation of Library of Congress Faceted Vocabularies

"Romantic Violin Performing Practices: A Handbook." Music Reference Services Quarterly, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2 

Casey A. Mullin

Papers

Faceted Vocabularies for Music: A New Era in Resource Discovery

International Music Score Library Project, Petrucci Music Library

A Brave New (Faceted) World: Towards Full Implementation of Library of Congress Faceted Vocabularies

Romantic Violin Performing Practices: A Handbook