Sixteenth-century lute players turned vocal songs into instrumental solos by a process called intabulation, and this project will build digital tools to decode those arrangements as creative acts, not just technical exercises. The problem is that surviving lute intabulations—thousands of pieces—are typically studied as isolated musical texts. This misses the social and artistic networks behind them: the composers, arrangers, collectors, printers, and performers who shaped each version. Current digital methods cannot capture these relationships. DELTA will create “digital companions”—interactive online resources that combine notation, video recordings, and contextual data. A virtual fingerboard will let users explore how a single vocal piece was transformed by different lutenists. The project also aims to make rare tablature accessible to performers and scholars who cannot read the original notation. If successful, the research will change how musicologists and performers understand creative agency in the Renaissance. It will also demonstrate how linked data and encoding standards can preserve fragile cultural heritage sustainably. This is fundamental humanities scholarship: it deepens our knowledge of how music was made and shared, with no immediate practical application beyond better tools for digital musicology.
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The Digital Exploration of Lute Tablature Agencies (DELTA) project will convene an interdisciplinary group of experts, covering musicology, digital scholarship, music encoding, and linked data. Using new developments in these fields, we will re-read lute arrangements of vocal music as products of artistic, social, analytical and pragmatic processes that connect the written music to a wider context of musical cross-reference, culture and music theory, something which we will explore through new approaches to digital musicology. In this way, we situate this project in two scholarly contexts: the study of intabulation, and the affordances of digital scholarship. Amongst the surviving European solo instrumental music in the written record of the 16th century, a significant proportion come in the form of arrangements of other works. For lute music the act of intabulation – arranging a polyphonic score for a single instrument – was a recognised art, with intabulations by famous virtuoso lutenists as well as by amateur musicians. This activity can itself be read as a network of different agencies: DELTA will reframe the act of intabulation as a network of composers, 'intabulators', collectors, printers, and scholars. In the digital sphere, developments in encoding standards, hardware and software will enable DELTA to create musical ‘digital companions’ – richly interconnected and interactive explorations incorporating notation, video recordings and other contextual information, with novel modes for presentation and navigation. The project will develop a virtual fingerboard to enhance our own exploration of the material, while also bringing otherwise inaccessible lute tablature to a wider audience. Users of the companions will see and understand the intabulation process with greater clarity, alongside relationships between multiple intabulations of the same work, plus the vocal models they are built on. DELTA is an international collaboration between the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich (Germany) and the University of Oxford (UK), working in partnership with the RISM Digital Center (Switzerland), the Bavarian State Library (Germany), and the Lute Societies of the UK and Germany. Four aims motivate and frame the work of the project. The first is musicological: to extend our understanding of the process of lute intabulation as an artistic and pragmatic activity, locating practice historically and socially as well as analytically. Secondly, DELTA will amplify these musicological investigations by demonstrating the value of digital companions in supporting scholarship and its dissemination. DELTA’s third aim is to create sustainable and FAIR digital scholarship: to maximise the availability, discoverability and sustainability of sources, digital transcriptions, and companions; and to demonstrate the value of publishing digital scholarship using recognised encoding standards and catalogues. Last, but not least, DELTA aims to work in collaboration with, and innovate alongside, expert and amateur performers, musicologists and enthusiasts; while also contributing collaboratively to the community of digital musicologists, including through contributions to the Music Encoding Initiative and its guidelines.
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