The basic musicological research project “Beethoven’s Workshop” focuses on genetic text criticism combined with digital music editing, offering new perspectives in musicological research. This project examines Beethoven’s compositional processes and employs digital technologies to disseminate its findings.
In the fourth module, which addresses sketches, Beethoven’s sketchbook from early 1823, known as Notirungsbuch K, will be digitally reconstructed and made accessible. Each sketch’s scriptural characters will be recorded from the manuscripts and correlated with corresponding diplomatic and annotated transcriptions. This linkage aims to create an animated presentation that transparently illustrates the transition from facsimile to transcription, or from recording findings to interpretation, for users.
In this presentation, we will introduce the project and its methodological approaches, explain the use of digital tools, mechanisms of the encoding, and present the results and objectives of the fourth module of “Beethoven’s Werkstatt.” The presentation will highlight the advantages of digital music editing for research and teaching, such as enabling collaborative work, interactive visualization of text variants, and the provision of comprehensive metadata.
Richard Sänger studied musicology, German studies and psychology at the University of Koblenz. He completed his master’s degree in 2014 with a critically annotated edition of the “Biographical Notes on Ludwig van Beethoven” by Franz Gerhard Wegeler and Ferdinand Ries. Since 2014, he has been working as a research assistant on the academy project Beethovens Werkstatt. As part of the project, he is completing his doctorate with a thesis on Beethoven’s sketches from the Bonn period, focusing primarily on Beethoven’s textual references. In recent years, he has given numerous lectures on the subject of genetic text criticism and digital editions. He also regularly gives courses on the MEI music encoding format at the Edirom Summer School in Paderborn.
Johannes Kepper has a background in musicology and computing in media, and works in the field of Digital Music Editions since more than 20 years, having been involved in projects like Edirom and Freischütz Digital. Almost equally long, he is an active developer of the MEI standard and served different roles in the MEI community. Since 2023, he holds a professorship on Digital Music Philology / Digital Humanities at Paderborn University and serves as Principal Investigator of the Beethovens Werkstatt project.
For further information, please contact:
Katalin Kim – kim.katalin@abtk.hu