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Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut Manuscript

23 August, 2010

"The Ferrell-Vogüé Machaut MS (formerly known variously as Vg, Vogüé, Wildenstein, etc.) is now available in its entirety online through the DIAMM website. The MS is currently on loan to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge through the generosity of the owners, James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell, and the images may be accessed on the website by navigating to that library once you are logged in (i.e. Great Britain > Cambridge > Corpus Christi College > Ferrell-Vogue MS).

AHRC DEDEFI grant award

4 February, 2010

We have received the excellent and exciting news of the award of a 1-year grant from the AHRC that will enable to project to run for a further year; to upgrade our excellent single-shot camera from 39 megapixels to 65 Mpx; to obtain further images of fragments in France and Italy; to create an online course in reading medieval music to accompany the manuscript images on the website; and to continue updating and improving the database content so that when the new website comes online the content will be more complete and more usefully searchable by users.

Photography work in Spain

25 January, 2010

Lynda Sayce, project photographer, has just returned from Spain, having spent two weeks with David Catalunya working in Spanish Libraries around Madrid and Barcelona. Fragments and complete sources from Barcelona, Burgos, Madrid, Solsona, Tarragona, Valladolid and Vallbona, were photographed in a whirlwind tour during some of the worst weather conditions for travel that we have yet encountered (it took 75 mins to get the car from my front door to the main road!). We await news on permissions for making these images available online.

DIAMM announces upcoming facsimile publications

1 January, 2010

DIAMM is launching two high quality colour facsimile publications as the pilot outputs for DIAMM Publications: The Eton Choirbook and the Dow Partbooks. Full details of the publications, plus a generous pre-publication discount, can be seen on our publications page.

Margaret Bent awarded Claude Palisca Prize

15 November, 2009

This year’s Claude Palisca Prize for an outstanding edition or translation has been awarded to Margaret Bent for the introductory study and facsimile of the MS Bologna Q15. The photography, typesetting and page-makeup were all done by DIAMM, and the citation says "the quality of photography and reproduction is breathtaking. Photographed in color when it was disbound, with illegible pages digitally restored, the edition allows us to read some music for the very first time. Initials have been filmed on both sides enabling the editor to discern music that was discarded when the manuscript was recopied. Reproducing the original cover, watermarks, and gathering signatures, the facsimile can actually claim to be more useful and informative than having the original on one’s desk." The publication was the unanimous choice of the committee.

DIAMM Associate Directors

1 October, 2009

As part of the restructuring of DIAMM following the retirement of Prof Andrew Wathey as a project director, the following have been appointed associate directors:

Dr Nicolas Bell (British Library)

Dr Elizabeth Eva Leach (Faculty of Music, University of Oxford)

Dr Martin Kauffmann (Bodleian Library, Oxford)

Dr Owen Rees (Faculty of Music, University of Oxford)

DIAMM introduces online donations

21 May, 2009

DIAMM is now set up to accept donations from its users. A new DIAMM PayPal account has been set up into which users can donate any amount they choose in any currency in which they have a credit card or bank account.

It is not necessary for users to have an existing personal PayPal account in order to donate.

If you would like to consider donating to DIAMM in order to keep it free to all users, please go to the donations page and click on the 'Donate' button.

More new British Library images

18 March, 2009

Due to some recent image acquisitions, we are pleased to announce that the following complete manuscripts from the British Library are available to be viewed online:

Add. 5465

Add. 31922

Add. 57950

Egerton 3307

Royal 11.e.xi

Royal 8.g.vii

New images available: Dow and Peterhouse Partbooks

1 March, 2009

DIAMM is pleased to announce that we have just made available more than 3700 new images on our website. These images are from two very important collections from the latter half of the 16th century.

DIAMM is excited to present online a very famous set of partbooks held at Christ Church in Oxford. Known as the 'Dow partbooks', these contain a large amount English music by Byrd, Parsons, White, and many other important composers from the third quater of the 16th century.

The shelfmarks for these books are: Oxford, Christ Church, Mus. 984-988.

In 2008 DIAMM began a collaboration with Peterhouse, Cambridge. 2720 manuscript images of books housed there are now available online. These are from the following books:

471 - 474, the so-called 'Henrican partbooks'.

475

476

477

478

479

480

481

485

486

487

489

This project will eventually make available all of the music manuscripts held at Peterhouse. The remaining three partbooks are current undergoing resotoration work and will be photographed in the summer of 2009 while unbound.

DIAMM appoints intern for 2009

1 February, 2009

DIAMM has appointed an intern for 2009. Giovanni Varelli will be mainly involved in creating inventories.

Giovanni graduated from the University of Pavia in Italy, from the Faculty of Musicology, in December 2008. He studied medieval music manuscripts, liturgy, paleography, neumatic notation, and codicology with Professor Giacomo Baroffio.

Giovanni will also be involved with the Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, working closely with Dr Nicolas Bell, one of DIAMM's Associate Directors.

Giovanni currently works with the editors of Medioevo Musicale, an Italian medieval music bibliography bulletin.

Funding secured by The Alamire Foundation for Alamire Choirbooks Online project

12 September, 2008

We are pleased to announce that The Alamire Foundation have recently been awarded €150 000 over three years to finance its ongoing work. A large portion of this money will be dedicated to the photography, processing, and delivery of the images required for the proposed Alamire Choirbooks Online project in collaboration with DIAMM.

The grant came from a foundation closely connected with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Work has already been initiated on photographing these sources and both DIAMM and The Alamire Foundation look forward to seeing the fruits of their collaboration appear online soon.

Morrill Music Library, Villa I Tatti provides seed funding for Alamire Choirbooks Online project

29 August, 2008

DIAMM today was made the beneficiary of a €10 000 grant from The Morril Music Library at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies). This money is to be used specifically for the acquisition of high-quality digital images of Alamire choirbooks and is the first funding received for the new Alamire Choirbooks Online collaboration between The Alamire Foundation and DIAMM.

Launch of new website

12 May, 2008

Version 1.8 of the DIAMM online resource was brought online on. Apart from a reorganisation of the information pages this iteration brings several important technical changes online.

There are numerous content updates, the most important of which is the expansion of the abbreviated bibliographies taken from RISM and CCM to full citations of every entry. Unfortunately this is not yet available for every source description, but this is because we found that many of the abbreviations in the bibliographies were not provided with full expansions in the full bibliography lists in these catalogues. We are working on supplying the information, and future uploads should include the new data.

Alamire collaboration

19 March, 2008

DIAMM has been in collaboration for some time with the University of Jena regarding the digitization of their choirbook collection, which includes one of the larges collections of manuscripts originally prepared by the workshop of Petrus Alamire in the Netherlands. The digitization of the collection (which is still ongoing) led to the conception of a project within DIAMM to digitize all the Alamire books that survive, and to make them available as ‘Alamire Choirbooks Online’. The primary research and early organisation of this project was undertaken by Greg Skidmore, the DIAMM Outreach Research Co-ordinator. With the additional support and enthusiasm of Michael Friebel in Vienna, DIAMM secured an invitation from the ONB to digitize their Alamire collection, which is rivalled only by that of Jena in size and importance. We are investigating funding that would allow us to undertake this work as soon as possible, together with the Alamire books in other libraries across a number of European countries.

A recent development in this exciting project is what we hope will turn into a fruitful collaboration between DIAMM and the Alamire Foundation in Leuven. Members of both groups will be meeting in Oxford in May 2008 to discuss plans for digitization and the eventual presentation of these manuscripts online. We look forward to reporting on the outcome of this meeting.

Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste appointed Director

25 February, 2008

We are very pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste as a new Director of DIAMM following the retirement of Professor Andrew Wathey.

Thomas Schmidt-Beste came to Bangor University as Professor of Music and Head of School in 2005, after having taught at the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. One of his main research interests (besides the music of Mendelssohn and Mozart) has always been the music of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the study of sources of that period in particular. From 1995 to 2002, he was employed as a postdoctoral research assistant at the "Cappella Sistina" research project of the Heidelberg Academy of Arts and Sciences, cataloguing the music manuscripts of the Papal Chapel in the Vatican Library. In 1998-9, he was a Fedor Lynen Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, working in the Renaissance Music Archives at the University of Illinois-Urban/Champaign. After his Habilitation in 2001 (on Text Declamation in the 15th-Century Motet), he initiated a research database on 15th- and early-16th-century motets which was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, first through a Heisenberg Senior Research Fellowship (2002-2005) and then through a large research grant (2005-2007). The project is ongoing and output from it will soon be made available through DIAMM. Thomas Schmidt-Beste is a member of the editorial board of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart; a founding member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) at Bangor/Aberystwyth; secretary of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society; and a member of RMA Council. In the autumn of 2008, he will spend a term as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste and his research team have been working for several years on (among other things) transcriptions of full texts of motets in original and modern spellings, and the creation of new diplomatic incipits for this corpus of music, represented until now only by the manuscript descriptions provided in RISM. These descriptions were created in some cases nearly half a century ago, and used shortcuts such as referring the reader to incipits of the same work in another manuscript which may have used a different notational style, thus misrepresenting the contents of the first manuscript.

These new incipits and the transcriptions of the texts will soon become available and will be searchable through the DIAMM website. Work on creating the data is ongoing and will be incorporated into the website on a rolling basis.

Crucial to the creation of new incipits since 2007 has been the development by Theodor Dumitrescu of his CMME software, which allows early music notations to be encoded in xml, making the output searchable and editable.

DIAMM receives major equipment grant from the John Fell OUP Research Fund

21 February, 2008

DIAMM has been awarded a grant of £28,000 from the John Fell OUP Fund to enable us to purchase a new single-shot high-resolution digital camera, the PhaseOne P45+.

The camera will enable DIAMM to photograph at its customary high standards, but at much greater speed than has been possible with existing equipment, thus bringing per-image costs down dramatically. The P45+ is a 'single-shot' digital camera, which means that it operates much as any consumer camera: the click of the shutter takes the picture. The big difference with this camera is that its sensor is large enough to obtain archive quality images. It is suitable for documents around A4 size and smaller. For larger documents, or those requiring higher resolution the project will continue to use the PhaseOne PowerPhase scanning back.

This new equipment also enables DIAMM to complete work for client projects at a much lower cost than would have originally been considered. As an example, one project would have taken around 5 months to complete with the PhaseOne PowerPhase, but could be done in less than a month with the new P45+. This brings many projects that have been financially out of reach into the realm of possibility.

DIAMM is extremely grateful to the Faculty of Music in Oxford for sponsoring its application, and to Alex Lumbers for guiding us through the application process, and suggesting the Fund to us initially.

The camera is available to other Humanities departments in Oxford when it is not in use by DIAMM.

Professor Andrew Wathey retires as Director

20 February, 2008

Following his appointment as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Northumbria, Andrew Wathey has stepped down as an active director of DIAMM, though remains involved in the project as a Founding Director. We are very sorry to lose his valuable advice and participation in the project that he co-founded, and wish him well in his new post.

Prof Andrew Wathey Appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Northumbria

19 December, 2007

Professor Andrew Wathey, co-founder and Director of DIAMM has been appointed to the position of Vice-Chancellor of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. For the last few years Prof Wathey has been Vice-Principal for Planning and Resources at Royal Holloway, and recently the senior Vice-Principal.

Installation of master database server

11 November, 2007

Data input to the master DIAMM database forms a very large part of our day-to-day work. The inclusion of the whole of RISM series BIV and the Census Catalogue involves not simply cutting and pasting the scanned text, but careful proof-reading and the transfer of the information it contains to fields that will eventually be searchable online. In addition there is a considerable amount of work involved in keying the bibliographical abbreviations to the full citations, and marking up the full bibliographical citations to a consistent house style.

In 2008 we appointed a number of new research assistants. Under the guidance of Prof Thomas Schmidt-Beste in Bangor, Diane Temme was put in charge of proofing the German text entries and Alison Salter works on the database of motet texts. Tim Symonds in Newcastle took on much of the English-language proof-reading, with assistance from Eleanor Weaver and Joe Bell in Oxford. Ben Ganly took on the mammoth task of checking and marking up the bibliography database of nearly 3400 items, about 300 of which were incomplete or too vague to be of use as expanded references.

This meant of course that, along with the existing DIAMM staff, a large number of people from all over the country needed access to the master offline database. Ican, who provide us with technical support for our Filemaker databases installed a Filemaker web server, and the working database went live in November 2007. The server had the added benefit of being able to serve databases from sister projects, Chopin’s First Editions Online (www.cfeo.org.uk) and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition (www.ocve.org.uk). Naturally this working database is not visible to the public, but the results of the work being done on it are becoming increasingly visible as our content expands and is constantly enriched.

Establishment of International Advisory Board

15 October, 2007

The advice of the scholarly community has always shaped the activities of DIAMM, and ensured that it meets the needs of the scholars for whom it is principally intended. Many of these scholars have contributed to shaping the content of DIAMM by negotiating with the owners of documents on which they are working to allow DIAMM to photograph them, or facilitated our work abroad with their assistance and advice. In many cases they have also contributed information about new discoveries and updates to our manuscript descriptions, which are largely drawn from relatively old printed catalogues.

The establishment of the International Advisory Board gives recognition for the support and contribution of these scholars, and also formalizes their activities as part of the essential roots of DIAMM.

DIAMM International Advisory Board:

Dr Suzannah Clark appointed Associate Director of DIAMM

22 September, 2007

Dr Suzannah Clark, Lecturer in Music and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford joins Dr Nicolas Bell, Dr Elizabeth Eva Leach and Prof Thomas Schmidt-Beste as an Associate Director of DIAMM, building on our existing Oxford connection. Dr Clark works primarly on the history of music theory, and has focused in particular on Rameau, Fétis, Oettingen, Schenker, as well as neo-Riemannian approaches. She is interested in how theorists underpin their systems with appeals to external phenomena and how this affects their conceptions of tonal space. She is also currently working on a book Analyzing Schubert, which is a reception history of Schubert's harmony in both the songs and instrumental music. Her medieval research focuses on the 13th-century French motet and its use of the 'refrain', and she teaches undergraduate courses in the Music Faculty on the motet from c.1220-1450 and the lyric traditions of the troubadours and trouvères, among other subjects.

Appointment of Outreach Research Co-ordinator (ORC)

5 August, 2007

Greg Skidmore, one of the team of researchers working on DIAMM has been appointed Outreach Research Co-ordinator. Greg will head up negotiations and organisation of collaborative projects with other organisations, and is starting with the establishment of a working group to examine the financial and practical needs of the digitization and online presentation of the Alamire Choirbooks, a project that has been under consideration for several years.

Greg is currently a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, studying the printed music book trade in the 16th and early 17th centuries using the music library of King John IV of Portugal as a case study. He is also a professional singer, employed in Oxford at Christ Church Cathedral as a Lay Clerk. He also sings regularly with The Gabrieli Consort, I Fagiolini, and Ex Cathedra and is busy on the oratorio circuit.

Digitization of the Peterhouse partbooks

23 May, 2007

A major initiative was undertaken in May 2007 with the start of digitization of the Peterhouse Partbooks. Partly stimulated by the discovery of several of the lost partbooks, Scott Mandelbrote and Peterhouse Cambridge decided that the partbooks should be restored and digitized.

The digitization is being undertaken by DIAMM’s photographer Lynda Sayce, in Cambridge and in Devon, where some of the books are being restored. The digitization is ongoing due to the large number of books and folios. Work will be completed some time in 2008, and the images will be brought online through the DIAMM website on a rolling basis.

In total this project will digitize 18 partbooks, realising several thousand new images of central early modern English repertory.

New Phase of development work begins with funding from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation

1 January, 2007

A major technical development grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation has given DIAMM funds to expand its data content dramatically, and undertake major work on the web delivery mechanism that will radically enhance content and improve the user interface.

The first change that users will notice is that registration for use of the site no longer requires users to download, print, sign and post a user access agreement. Online registration has been implemented, so that access to all the images on the site can be gained within seconds.

Many other improvements and enhancements will become visible in a staged upgrading process from now until December 2009.

Appointment of Associate Directors for DIAMM

23 October, 2006

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Nicolas Bell (British Library), Elizabeth Eva Leach (Royal Holloway) and Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste (Bangor) as Associate Directors of DIAMM. Direction and support from those involved in medieval musicology is essential to the development of the DIAMM resource as a research entity, and we look forward to their input and advice in planning and realising our future.

Dr Nicolas Bell is Curator of Music Manuscripts at the British Library. His research interests centre on polyphonic music of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and his study of the Las Huelgas Codex was published by Testimonio of Madrid in 2003. He acts as reviews editor for Plainsong & Medieval Music and The Library (Transactions of the Bibliographical Society). and sits on the Councils of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and the Henry Bradshaw Society as well as the Advisory Board of the Cantus Planus Study Group of the International Musicological Society.

Elizabeth Eva Leach is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London and specializes in the music and poetry of lyrics in fourteenth-century France. A historical musicologist and music theorist, she recently received the Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory for an article on the gendering of the semitone in fourteenth-century theory. Her book, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages was published by Cornell in 2007. She is currently Chairman of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society and has just completed a book on Guillaume de Machaut during a period of leave funded by RHUL and the AHRC.

Thomas Schmidt-Beste came to Bangor University as Professor of Music and Head of School in 2005, after having taught at the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. As well as the music of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the study of sources of that period in particular, he has done research on Mozart and Mendelssohn. After his Habilitation in 2001 (on Text Declamation in the 15th-Century Motet), he initiated a research database on 15th- and early-16th-century motets which was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, first through a Heisenberg Senior Research Fellowship (2002-2005) and then through a large research grant (2005-2007). The project is ongoing and output from it will soon be made available through DIAMM. Thomas Schmidt-Beste is a member of the editorial board of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart; a founding member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) at Bangor/Aberystwyth; secretary of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society; and a member of RMA Council.

Dr Julia Craig-McFeely appointed co-Director of DIAMM

1 October, 2006

Since its inception in 1998 DIAMM has been managed by Dr Julia Craig-McFeely, who undertook all management tasks as well as considerable travelling throughout the UK and Europe, visiting libraries and archives to photograph their documents. Early in 2007 her contribution to the development and growth of DIAMM was recognised when she was made a Director of DIAMM. She was made a Research Fellow of Royal Holloway, Unversity of London, in early 2007.

AHRC ICT Methods Network: Digital Image Restoration Workshop

29 June, 2006

The DIAMM Digital Restoration Workshop, took place at Oxford University on 29 June 2006.

This centred on the pioneering use of mainstream commercial software to recover damaged and obscured readings from manuscript sources which have been captured by high-resolution digital imaging. As the facilities required to create high quality digital images become more widely available in libraries and other repositories, increasing numbers of scholars are looking to this medium to reveal information that has either been obscured by conventional document restoration processes, or has proved beyond the capacity of conventional restoration to reveal. The main advantage of digital restoration is the lack of invasive procedure on the original document, and the provision of an image that may be more revealing than the original.

DIAMM has been demonstrating the results of digital restoration at conferences and seminars for some years, and this workshop was organised by the AHRC ICT Methods Network in response to demand from scholars internationally to learn the techniques and underlying methods used by DIAMM this process. Full training materials and information about creating a suitable "master" image were provided.

Participants received a printed workbook, and this is also available to buy in hard copy (price £10 plus p+p), or to download as pdf which can then be printed. Unfortunately because of rights issues we are not currently able to supply the images used for demonstration purposes during the workshop, but the descriptions and examples in the book should be sufficient to enable users to try the techniques on their own images.

New content

31 May, 2006

Two major British Library MSS have been brought online - Add. 57950 (The Old Hall Manuscript) and Eg. 3307. These are both major sources of medieval English polyphony, and contrast with much of our content as the sources are complete rather than fragmentary. Dr Bent has long been associated with the Old Hall Manuscript through her pioneering work on John Dunstaple, and users will be glad to have access to these superb high-resolution colour images.

In addition to these major manuscripts, 152 enhanced images and 225 UV images have been brought online and are viewable alongside their unrestored counterparts, photographed with normal light.

DIAMM Project Manager appointed to manage Chopin project

1 January, 2006

http://www.ocve.org.uk

The Online Chopin Variorum Edition, was guided through its pilot phase by Director Professor John Rink and Project Manager Dr Danae Stefanou. Following Dr Stefanou’s appointment to a lectureship in Greece OCVE sought a new project manager experienced in handling digital images.

As DIAMM had been advising OCVE and its sister project Chopin’s First Editions Online (www.cfeo.org.uk) in managing its metadata and imaging needs, the progression to taking over management duties from Dr Stefanou was natural, and took place seamlessly in March 2007.