Palimpsests are conventionally understood to be manuscripts that have been reused or recycled, with traces of earlier inscriptions identifiable under later writings. Metaphorically, the term connotes ideas about reading off meanings, references or signs that remain recorded below surface appearance. Here I consider the palimpsestic nature of musical instruments, drawing extensively on the literary typology set out by Gerard Genette in his 1997 work Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Ultimately, I consider how any musical instrument is shadowed by a past that may or may not be visible through its morphology and/or surface ornamentation.

This paper demonstrates how component musical instrument parts can be recreated from manufacturers' technical drawings using 3D printing. While the application of this technology is not new, previous approaches have usually involved Computer Tomography scanning of extant models. Instead we used surviving technical drawings of clarinet mouthpieces originally manufactured by Boosey & Hawkes. We demonstrated that this non-invasive technique can be used to 3D print musical component parts if the original plans survive, even when extant parts do not. We also demonstrated through qualitative feedback from professional musicians that hand finishing of 3D printed mouthpieces remains essential for skilled performers.

Music Information Retrieval (MIR)—a term that embraces a range of interdisciplinary but science-based approaches to gain information about music—remains for many musicologists a rather enigmatic part of the music studies field. Some of the reasons for this are considered below. The more recent arrival of Big Music Data (BMD)—very large-scale collections of data pertaining to music in the form of audio recordings, consumer preferences, bibliographic information, etc.—is an emergent topic that, as David Huron argues, contributes to the transformation of musicology from a data-poor to a data-rich field.1 This article considers the relationships between MIR, BMD, and musicology, particularly in relation to the analysis of recorded music. It starts by providing a brief overview of the study of recorded music in the different parts of the music studies field, before giving some insights into ongoing MIR work and how this supplements and augments musicological work elsewhere. The main part of the article looks at the opportunities afforded by software such as that generated as part of the recently established Digital Music Lab, as well as reflecting on both the technical and the conceptual challenges that BMD provide in relation to musicology. Three case studies are detailed, which evidence the type of musicological insights that can be gained from investigating BMD. The article concludes by introducing Franco Moretti’s concept of “distant reading” as a hermeneutic device to explain the possible benefits of BMD for musicologists.

Musicians form a notably large subset of Desert Island Discs castaways, perhaps because, in a programme devoted to the relationship between music and autobiography, the personal histories of those who actually produce music are thought to be of particular interest. This chapter examines the changing proportions of different types of musicians appearing on the programme, before focusing particularly on interviews with classical musicians, who form by far the largest group of musician castaways overall. I view these interviews as having the qualities of oral history testimonies. They provide not only information on the lives and livelihoods of particular individuals, but also insights into subjects that otherwise risk being passed over, such as the oral/aural tradition of classical music, and the myths and myth-making through which it is in part perpetuated.

Performing Civility takes its place among a burgeoning collection of ethnographically grounded studies of Western classical music institutions. Other examples would include Henry Kingsbury’s ethnography of an American music conservatoire, Music, Talent and Performance (Philadelphia, 1988), Georgina Born’s assessment of Boulez’s IRCAM in Rationalizing Culture (Berkeley, 1995), and Claudio E. Benzecry’s investigation of opera fanatics at the Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (Chicago, 2011). This is distinguished company, and Lisa McCormick’s volume, which focuses on ‘International Competitions in Classical Music’, is a worthy addition. These ethnographic approaches to Western classical music and its practice seem to antagonize a small number of musicologists, who continue to argue for the primacy of the musical text and decry sociological or anthropological approaches that fail to put the musical sounds and structures at the centre of the methodology. McCormick’s work would certainly irk them further, since it contains no textual analysis. But the rest of us can enjoy a compelling and insightful volume that illuminates a hitherto unexplored part of the classical music landscape.

We present two datasets and an initial algorithm for the classification of semitone shifts. The semitone shift is a pattern in harmonic progressions, which has appeared relatively recently in Western tonal music. It is typically characterised by a change of key by one or two, sometimes more, semitones upwards and the repetition of a section of the music before and after the shift, which typically takes place towards the end of the piece. It is of musicological interest to recognise these key shifts automatically from audio recordings. The ultimate goal is to analyse large data collection to understand historically when this phenomenon started and how it spread and developed. The two datasets comprise popular music with annotations on whether and where the audio recordings contain a semitone shift. The initial algorithm presented is based on self similarity and dynamic time warping (DTW) for the detection of semitone shifts, and it shows encouraging performance on the presented datasets.

Samer Abdallah, Aquiles Alencar-Brayner, Emmanouil Benetos, Stephen Cottrell Jason Dykes, Nicolas Gold, Alexander Kachkaev, Mahendra Mahey, Dan Tidhar, Adam Tovell, Tillman Weyde, Daniel Wolff 1 Department of Computer Science, University College London, 2 The British Library, 3 Department of Computer Science, City University London, 4 Department of Music, City University London 5 Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London dml-owner@city.ac.uk http://dml.city.ac.uk

Digital music libraries and collections are growing quickly and are increasingly made available for research. We argue that the use of large data collections will enable a better understanding of music performance and music in general, which will benefit areas such as music search and recommendation, music archiving and indexing, music production and education. However, to achieve these goals it is necessary to develop new musicological research methods, to create and adapt the necessary technological infrastructure, and to find ways of working with legal limitations. Most of the necessary basic technologies exist, but they need to be brought together and applied to musicology. We aim to address these challenges in the Digital Music Lab project, and we feel that with suitable methods and technology Big Music Data can provide new opportunities to musicology.

For the purpose of considering musical performance, at least, it is now useful to conceive of the 'long' twentieth century, since the cultural, technological and economic forces that shaped performance in that century have their roots in practices that arose in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This is particularly true of the impact of sound-recording technology, which so profoundly changed the nature of performance in nearly all genres and contexts throughout the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, for present purposes, Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877 marks the beginning of the long twentieth century. It is still perhaps a little too early, and we are at this point too close to it, to be sure where it might be seen to end, although some speculation is offered below.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsStephen CottrellStephen Cottrell is Professor of Music at City University London. He has particular interests in ethnomusicology and western art music, musical performance, and musical instruments. A monograph, Professional Music-making in London, was published by Ashgate (2004), and a second monograph on The Saxophone is forthcoming from Yale University Press