Identifying concordances and musical inter-relationships using digital tools: Where to from here?

Identification of concordances and musical inter-relationships in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music has been hampered by a lack of suitable tools. In recent research focussed on seventeenth-century Iberian keyboard repertories I have attempted to identify them using a system of encoded numerical incipits originally developed by Bruce Gustafson in the 1970s. The system is optimised so that the encoded incipits include enough information to facilitate a degree of interpretation on their own (i.e. without a score), yet also simple enough to be flexible in the ways that they can be searched. However, it has become clear that this method has its limitations. It works best in melody-oriented music with a well-defined rhythmic and tonal structure; in music conceived according to the ecclesiastical modes it is necessary to assign an arbitrary tonality when encoding an incipit. An even more fundamental problem is that, in imitative contrapuntal genres, a theme may possess only one or two notes per bar and thus extend to as few as five or six notes; incipits with few notes cannot be searched very easily using Gustafson’s system.

Other resources are available that may assist in concordance identification, notably the RISM Catalog (RISM-OPAC), which features an incipit search tool. I argue, however, that a more effective digital tool should be developed that moves beyond the concept of the incipit (derived from printed thematic catalogues) to incorporate information about rhythmic structure and surrounding textures from longer stretches of music. Such a tool would develop one of the key concepts of Gustafson’s system, which enables the researcher to reconstruct the musical context of an encoded incipit from the incipit itself. It would probably need to be designed to show a wide range of results from searches but express degrees of relationship as a percentage in the manner of Full-Text search of Early Music Prints Online (F-TEMPO) (https://f-tempo.org/).