Freischütz Digital

The “Freischütz Digital – Paradigmatic Implementation of an Authentic Digital Edition Concept” project sponsored by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [Federal Ministry of Education and Research] (BMBF) was a joint project of the Goethe University Frankfurt, the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, and University of Paderborn, the latter acting as overall coordinator.

Weber’s Freischütz, as an exemplary pilot project following the draft of a concept derived from Frans Wiering’s Multidimensional Model of authentically digital music editions, was to provide a proof of concept to demonstrate the potential of an innovative editorial technology and to deal with new issues associated with it. Six work packages jointly worked out by four project partners focused on the work’s graphic, logical, and acoustic (or performative) domains, emphasizing at the same time a comprehensive and detailed data contextualization and the formalized linkage concepts required for this. Using MEI, the music-encoding standard for a comprehensive work in Common Western Music Notation (CMN), for the first time and pairing it with a TEI encoding of the verbal text elements opened up completely new possibilities of processing, enriching, and reusing data. By exploring the opportunities for linking to and segmenting audio recordings, the project attempted to contribute to the solution of generic issues in the acoustic field; by demonstrating the potential of its innovative digital-edition model, it endeavored to promote discussion of future edition forms and to encourage further basic research through exemplary investigations of the variance aspect.

Hence, the project was less intended to produce finished results than to show a range of possibilities and to promote new types of access. Bound up with this is the fact that the presentation at hand does not reflect a state of equilibrium attained by the official end of the subsidy in October 2015, but is to be dynamically developed further insofar as this is achievable by means of appropriate work activities. Ultimately, the hope is that upgrades and refinements, or follow-up research on the now freely available data will be made possible in the future through strategic individual grants (also within the academic environment). In this sense, Freischütz Digital can be thought of, on the one hand, as documenting the completed BMBF project, but on the other, it is a still open platform whose instigators welcome feedback and ideas.