Variorum Editions Across Text and Music:  the Early Modern Songscapes Project

1. Abstract

Early Modern Songscapes (EMS) is an interdisciplinary project that aims to develop an intermedia online platform to support scholarly investigations early modern English song, by tracing individual lyrics and musical settings that moved through different textual and performance contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The first iteration of the project, now completed, has focused on Henry Lawes’s 1653 Ayres and Dialogues, highlighting versions of the songs that have been published, co-located with image and sound materials relating to each individual song. The edition includes both verse and music notation, which are encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative and the Music Encoding Initiative formats. A handful of ayres exist in multiple sources, in which cases, variants from each source are shown as part of the digital editions. This presentation will focus on the modeling, processing, and presentation of these variorum editions in particular, which we argue is applicable beyond this project.