Medieval music database

The La Trobe University Medieval Music Database provides access to most of the music of the middle ages by combining colour images of original manuscripts, transcriptions of these into modern notation and references to all editions, facsimiles, scholarly literature and recordings. It allows the user to search a repertoire of 10,000 works by text, descriptor or melody. The database delivers both an image of the original source and a score in modern musical notation to facilitate modern performance. The database is the result of combining two originally independent projects, both begun in 1984. The first was a study of a fifteen-volume set of medieval choirbooks, written in Perugia in the first decades of the fourteenth century, which contain a complete annual cycle of Gregorian chant. This project was undertaken by Professor Margaret Manion (Fine Arts, University of Melbourne) and John Stinson (Music, La Trobe University). For this project a specialized computer program (SCRIBE) was written by Brian Parish and John Stinson which enabled the encoding, storing, searching and retrieval of medieval music in its original notation. Over the following ten years the entire contents of the Perugian choirbooks was encoded, and the collection checked against other medieval manuscripts of the same religious order. The result is a thoroughly checked collection of chant in medieval notation, together with a suite of programs which translate the medieval notation into a form which can be read by Score, for many years the industry-standard program for modern music notation. The resultant SCRIBE database is now the largest database of medieval melodies which preserves the original notation. Its encoding language has been expanded to include all notational styles used between the eighth and the sixteenth centuries, including the coloured notations used in the very complicated music of the late fourteenth century, which uses red as well as black notation. The development of this program and its database has been supported by the Australian Research Council as well as by La Trobe and Melbourne Universities. The second project, directed by Professor John Griffiths of the University of Melbourne and John Stinson of La Trobe University, had as its aim to make digital recordings of 'a representative sample' of the music of the fourteenth century. 150 secular works of the fourteenth century were recorded: many have been published in a series of five CDs on the Move label. During the course of the project, many other goals were achieved, including complete revisions of the French and Italian texts of poems set to music in the fourteenth century, and a database of every manuscript, facsimile, scholarly study and recording of every one of the 3,198 works. This database is not just a listing of works: the texts and English translations are of interest to literary scholars and historians as well as musicians; and the extensive cross-referencing of works, composers and manuscripts has revealed many lacunae in standard reference books such as RISM and Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century. This database was launched onto the Internet in 1994. The texts and translations were deliberately not included in the Internet version. The Fourteenth-century Music Recording Project was supported over six years by the Australian Research Council, La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne. Together the combined two databases give a comprehensive view of almost all of the music known to have existed in the late middle ages. There is material which does not yet appear on this combined database: the troubadour and trouvere repertoires, Aquitanian and Notre Dame polyphony, variant versions of Gregorian chants from different dioceses, other manuscript versions, etc. As manuscripts of both secular music and chant were often highly decorated and illuminated, the pictures contained in these manuscripts have not been included (except for two manuscripts).