Historiography of Musical Form through MIR

This project offers a study of cultural transfer in Europe from a new perspective and using new technological methods. It aims at reconstructing the distribution of a specific musical form the small rounded twohree-part form (sr2/3pf in the following) in popular music collections printed and published in diverse places of Europe in the first half of the 18th century: London, Amsterdam, Paris, and various Germany-speaking cities. In doing this, it will pursue two purposes. First, it will put the theory into perspective, according to which the sr2/3pf is constitutive of many compositions of the Viennese classical style. Second, the project will support and complement recent musicological studies that revealed that the concept of Volkslied and the Volkston-These attributing a volkstümlichen Ton to some compositions of especially Haydn and Mozart, but also Beethoven, are little more than fiction generated in the framework of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism. It will do so by demonstrating that, already before the development of the Viennese classical style in the later 18th century, the sr2/3pf shaped popular repertories (dances and songs) in regions of Europe that are usually not considered the cradle of Viennese classicism. To this end, this project will determine the quantity of the sr2/3pf in popular repertories that were printed, sold and probably performed in various European places London, Amsterdam and Paris complemented by various cities in German-speaking countries. As the project will demonstrate, it were the repertories at those places that contributed to the stylistic formation and the standardization of the sr2/3pf. Optical music recognition software will help to transform the scores of these musical bodies (short songs and dances) into digital files resulting in ca. 2000 data sets. Computer-analytical tools, written for this project, will identify the individual components of the sr2/3pf in the data sets. The results will be published in the following formats: a monograph that presents the history of the sr2/3pf in central Europe of early and mid-18th-century; an interactive map that is available online and visualizes the different phases of the development of the sr2/3pf in Europe; a journal article that reflects the music-analytical procedures developed for this project in light of cognitive-scientific research problems (context-dependence of the understanding of musical form). Generally, the proposed project will contribute new insights to the following areas: music information retrieval in music-historiographical contexts; theory and history of musical form in the 18th century; history of the concept of popular music; music cognition and music informatics; research on standardization and taste formation.

What is the reason for the paradox that classical music is an art form of the elites and at the same time understood and loved by everyone? The so-called Volkston thesis advocated since the mid-nineteenth century states that (Viennese) classical music is so popular because it has a Volkston. What this Volkston is and how it manifests itself in music has not yet been convincingly explained by its adherents. Nor, however, have critical music historians been able to refute the thesis. In any case, the Volkston thesis is suspect. For its invention and successful dissemination are closely related to nationalist and racist agendas and ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, especially in the Third Reich. P 29661 examined the Volkston thesis from a new angle. It shed light on their origins with the help of computer software developed specifically for the project. The digital tool analysed the form of an extensive corpus of popular songs and dances published in London, Paris and some German-speaking cities, including Vienna, from around the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. By examining this Big Data, the project showed that the Volkston thesis is the effect of a complex of multifaceted transcultural music-historical relationships that include music materialised in scores, music-cultural performance and reception practices, and narratives and discourses about music that are partly fictional and partly true.