Richard Freedman

With the help of an international team of scholars and information technologists, this project advances the study, teaching, and performance of Renaissance music by reconstructing missing voice parts for an important but neglected repertory of sixteenth-century French polyphonic songs. Reconstructions are combined with facsimiles and scholarly commentaries via the Music Encoding Initiative, which fulfills for musical texts the dynamic opportunities already afforded by the Text Encoding Initiative. The results will be a collaborative tool for use by all scholars, students, and performers of early music. This digital project will remain a permanent part of Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France), and its Programme Ricercar.

Building upon recent developments in digital music scholarship, Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass investigates similarity and borrowing in music on a massive but detailed scale, using digital tools that only a few years ago were beyond our grasp. This work focuses on the craft of musical counterpoint, and how musicians of the sixteenth century transformed pre-existing pieces to make intricate cyclic compositions from familiar sounds. The CRIM team, an accomplished group of scholars and data scientists active in Europe, North America, and Australia, will assemble a diverse collaborative network of music scholars and students at colleges, music schools and university graduate programs, extending the reach of digital scholarship to new users, and building new communities.