Gesualdo on-line the economic model of a digital music edition

Philippe Vendrix (CNRS -CESR, RICERCARLAB)

Presenting the economic model of a scientific edition does not mean suddenly reducing it to a commercial object. On the contrary, approaching it through the medium of project management, including its budgetary dimension, may prove to be a useful way of reflecting on the experience, feeling its dynamics and identifying its pitfalls. Some members of the musicological community question the practice of music publishing, while others call for the maintenance of a demanding philology that requires rare skills and a capacity for decision-making, for the manifestation of scientific authority 1 . For several decades now, the digital world has been shaking up our ways of conceiving, working and disseminating. From the collective construction of the Music Encoding Initiative 2 to the promotion of open science 3 , we are experiencing profound upheavals that are having a lasting effect on musicology in all its forms, whether philology or analysis, codicology or the establishment of fine chronologies 4 . However, to proclaim the end of one mode of expression in order to proclaim the power of another deserves to take into account the entire chain of knowledge production and dissemination. Through a singular case -the online publication of the work of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa -we wish to critically review an achievement of 2015 by placing it in the context of the budget. What financial and human resources are we mobilising to make Gesualdo's nearly 600 plays available to all readers? What are the consequences of such a prospect?

The project

The idea of offering an online edition of Gesualdo's works (GoL) was born from the convergence of several projects (https://ricercar.gesualdo-online.cesr.univ-tours.fr). First of all, there was the decision by Brepols to revise the editorial programme of the Epitome Musical collection. This collection brings together monographs, collective works, reference works and critical editions (https://www.brepols.net/series/em). The latter were struggling to find their place in the catalogue of a publishing house with a rich catalogue marked by the defence of humanistic scholarship and a great tradition of philological publications. The critical editions we proposed were also suffering from poor sales (though not catastrophic by comparison5 ). In short, we had to find a new way of sharing this important part of the musicological work on the early repertoire. And finding a solution was all the more important because the editions are one of the privileged places where musicologists and performers can engage in dialogue. This dialogue is essential for one of our patrons, the Ministry of Culture.

A second factor has been added to this first one. Since 2010, the RICERCARLAB has been carrying out a project for the recovery of incomplete Renaissance works. This has been a long-term project, with researchers working full-time on these restitutions. It was also the occasion for intensive workshops lasting several days, bringing together experienced researchers and students or doctoral candidates. A Virtual Workshop for Polyphonic Restoration (AVRP) was then created, whose purpose was not to enrich an already impressive repertoire with "new" works. The AVRP was conceived as a place for reflection and exchange on Renaissance contrapuntal techniques. A series of unfinished pieces from the first half of the 15th century to the beginning of the 17th century were selected to illustrate the diversity of approaches, to establish links between compositions and theoretical texts, and to avoid the application of a single reading grid to a diverse repertoire. The aim was at once pedagogical, historical, and analytical.

In other words, this workshop set out to lay the foundations of an experimental musicology applied to Renaissance counterpoint 6 . This workshop worked both classically and with the help of digital tools. It was first classical, when musicologists and experienced performers confronted each other with their solutions to the mystery of a missing part. It was then based on a digital project, when Richard Freedman attempted to systematise the reconstitution process on the basis of a repertoire that lent itself to it: the songs published by Du Chemin between 1549 and 1568 7 . This systematic approach has fed the Lost Voices project website (http://digitalduchemin.org) and led to the development of efficient digital tools for musical analysis.

Among the famous incomplete works, the second book of Gesualdo's Sacrae Cantiones occupies an essential place 8 . The resitution of the two missing voices (sextus and bassus) has been the subject of extensive work9 . The result, which is currently being edited, perfectly illustrates what we meant by 'classical' above.

In 2013, Dinko Fabbris launched a long-awaited editorial project, that of a monumental edition of the work of Carlo Gesualdo. He set up a scientific committee, convinced Bärenreiter to include this edition in its catalogue, and the project was launched10 . The RICERCARLAB is responsible for the volume of the Sacrae Cantiones. The first volumes of the monumental edition will appear in 2017 with the Madrigali a cinque voci. Libro quinto (1611), edited by Maria Caraci Vela. A fifth volume dedicated to the Madrigali a cinque voci. Libro primo (1594) was published in 2022 under the responsibility of Marco Della Sciucca. At the rate of one volume per year, the project should be completed by 2027. Each volume will be structured in the same way, in strict accordance with the tradition of musicological philology: an extensive introduction will be followed by an edition of the texts, then the musical transcriptions and, at the end of the volume, the critical apparatus. The global scholarly ambition of this monumental work is unparalleled. The sources are meticulously studied; the texts and compositions are the subject of detailed analyses that place Gesualdo's works in their poetic and musical context. Some illustrations allow the reader to measure the differences in the work of Gesualdo's editors, both during his lifetime and after his death. The volumes of the Baerenreiter edition do not provide links to library resources (to view the full source), catalogues (such as the Tasso in Music Project: https://www.tassomusic.org/) or GoL.

The invitation to contribute to the monumental edition and the work accumulated during the restitution workshops, combined with the digital ambitions of the Lost Voices Project, convinced us to develop a new tool that would serve both musicologists and performers: the realisation of a digital edition of Gesualdo's oeuvre.

The conception

This brief reminder of the context in which GoL was conceived gives an idea of the synthesis that underpinned the design of the digital edition. It was a question of combining experience and new ambitions, while taking care to

• Develop a new means of dissemination.
• Provide a response to the challenges of digital humanities in terms of publishing, without being limited to computer problems. • Promote dialogue, not only to propose new recompositions of the missing pieces, but also to try to create a collective dynamic. • To act quickly.

GoL is designed to be an interoperable digital library. The data is aligned with Dublin Core standards, while the whole is published under Omeka. The site provides three categories of data: links to sources, data on works, and information on individuals related to Gesualdo's production. The information on individuals is limited to essential data and links to resources useful in the case of Gesualdo (Treccani). The pages dedicated to the sources allow a simple navigation based on the reference to the works, on the references to the persons and on the links to the copies of the source in question (these links are now obsolete, but their updating to permalinks can easily be done).

For each work, this project provides a transcribed musical text from the oldest and most complete edition (in two formats: PDF from Sibelius files and MEI files). These transcriptions will then serve as a basis for integrating variants from other sources, emendations and reconstructions (if any). All contributions must be submitted to the project manager (using the form available in the Collaborative Publishing section). After validation by the editorial team, the variants will be included in the edition and the user's name will be listed among the contributors to the Gesualdo Online project. Users will be able to consult the edition directly on screen in a special interface that allows them to visualise (1) all the variants documented in subsequent early editions, (2) possible emendations, and (3) reconstructions of incomplete works. Variants, emendations and reconstructions can be viewed in three different ways:

• by clicking on the green dot at the top right of the measure in which the variant is located; • by clicking on the typology of the variant in the list that follows the score;

• or by selecting the source and the bar in the drop-down menu at the bottom of the interface.

A dialogue box below the interface allows the user to read relevant critical comments.

Registered users can add comments and make changes to the musical text. These criticisms can be both technical and epistemological. On the technical side, one only has to compare GoL's model with the updated RICERCARDATALAB model to see how far it has come in a few years. Navigation on GoL is constrained by Omeka, the richness of which we have

probably not yet exploited. It is quite different from what is currently practised.

At the epistemological level, things are much more complex. The fundamental questionand it's at the heart of everyone's concerns -remains how to anchor the principles of a classical philological edition in digital projects. We have tried to offer an alternative, without calling into question the fundamental principles, by bringing to life the information usually confined to critical apparatus 11 . These critical apparatuses are usually not easy to read! We have therefore opted for a system of variants in pop-up windows, with their explanations below the VexFlow visualisation of the file.

Some have criticised GoL for not offering authoritative editing. We will come back to this point with the measure of the user. In fact, a digital edition makes it possible to get rid of the principle of authority in order to provide all the data related to a piece of music in a comprehensible way. There is no claim to authority; there is the will to provide usable musical data according to modalities that everyone is free to define. Not everything has been achieved in terms of musical data. In 2015, the possibilities for annotating music files and the nature of headers in MEI files were far from what we know today.

Any negative criticism is not only audible, but essential to thinking about digital publishing today 12 . However, it seems essential to remember that the design at work in GoL is based on the superimposition of diplomatic readings of the sources. And in the case of Gesualdo, the confrontation with the sources is not extensive: the concordance tables bear eloquent witness to this, as does the critical apparatus of the few volumes published by Baerenreiter.

The cost

The GoL enterprise is far from complete. It lacks information, data and metadata. Above all, GoL should be integrated into an updated digital publishing structure 13 . But that is not our goal today. Beyond describing an already "outdated" realisation, we want to try to measure the cost of this still available resource. Strangely enough, in the now abundant literature on digital editions, the question of cost is rarely raised14 . On the other hand, there is no shortage of reflections on the obsolescence of digital resources and on the means available in the academic world to counteract it15 .

Putting a corpus online means mobilising resources for its production, realisation and dissemination. It also requires resources for its maintenance and the permanence of its accessibility. This is true of any book that is kept in a library under the watchful eye of specialised staff in dedicated buildings.

There is no economic model to refer to. However, financial data can be entered under traditional accounting headings, organised as follows This summary table calls for several comments. First, there is the question of marginal costs: travel and documentation. The accessibility of the collections makes it possible to carry out certain projects without incurring significant costs for travel or the acquisition of reproductions. This is a not inconsiderable saving of time and resources for an edition such as the GoL, which does not offer any new information on sources, the transmission of repertoires or a careful analysis of the choices and decisions made by printers or copyists in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Two lines of expenditure, however, show significant amounts. The first is devoted to the editorial work itself. Two musicologists (Marc Busnel, Cristina Cassia) were responsible for the musical transcription, the restoration of the missing parts of the Sacrae cantiones and the compilation of the poetic texts. Between them, they have accumulated 18 months of full-time work. Albert Napoli, Antoine Tanguy and Marco Gurrieri revised the data and prepared it for online publication. Finally, two CNRS engineers from RICERCARLAB, Hyacinthe Belliot and Vincent Besson, coordinated all the operations, ensured the integration of the data and supervised the work entrusted to an external private agency responsible for the design of the site. We will come back to three essential points: teamwork, complementarity of skills and management of the working time of all those involved. In this respect, there is a clear difference between the solitary daily life of the editor of a monumental volume and the obligatory coordination of different skills to achieve an expected result within a limited timeframe. Finally, the budget includes a line of €19,950 for Acatus, an Orléans company responsible for developing the site on the Omeka CMS and installing plug-ins for reading MEI files and their variants. This cost also requires comment. It is not a question here of assessing the amount incurred, which is relatively reasonable given the market at the time for the creation of sites. It corresponds to 9 months of full-time work for a musicologist (such as Marc Busnel or Cristina Cassia). Outsourcing (a private company outside the research institution) can guarantee a rapid response if the contract is scrupulously respected. In the long term, however, it raises questions: what ownership will internal staff have of a tool developed outside the laboratory? These concerns become problematic if the initial design is not based on a precise data management scheme that guarantees its future use under other CMS or other configurations.

This table (and therefore the averages derived from it) is incomplete. The costs are not considered in their context: the working environment should indeed take into account the resources of the laboratory in which the GoL was designed. Finally, it is not possible to specify the maintenance costs of a resource such as GoL, despite the obvious ecological stakes.

Recently, RICERCARLAB has launched public tenders that would make it possible to think about the cost of a resource like GoL in terms of transformation. As mentioned above, GoL was designed on Omeka in 2014-2015. Today, the new technical environment involves the transfer of the data to be poured in the RICERCARDATALAB model. This raises two issues of competence. One is the alignment of the data and the other is the standardisation of the musical data in a musical input file or in an MEI file. On the basis of Sibelius files that are ready for distribution and MEI files that still have shortcomings in terms of headers and annotations, we have agreed on a retro-conversion cost of €40 per piece of music (format such as a song or motet, or even a section of a mass). Applying this rate to the 595 pieces of Gesualdo would mean mobilising 23800€ today just for the adaptation of the files to cast them in a new digital environment.

GoL has 595 pieces. The input and the online adjustment would therefore be 236€ per piece of music. Such a rate applied to Lassus would have to be more than 500,000 €. It would be more or less the same for Palestrina, and the total would be close to one million euros for Philippe de Monte...

Perspectives

The aim of the present demonstration is not the market valuation of a digital resource. Except in the case of an exceptional philanthropic action, it would be utopian to imagine that a research or conservation institution would buy GoL in order to dispose of its data and distribute them according to its own modalities. It is even less conceivable that the project will be financed by public funds (Centre Val-de-Loire region, Ministry of Research, European funds), which presuppose a clearly stated policy of open access. A look at the resources required to carry out a project of this modest scale leads to a number of observations.

GoL is only possible in the context of a laboratory that has a set of competences. These competences are related to document management, to textual and musical philology, to musicology in general, but also to computer science. Bringing these skills together in a single location not only encourages high-quality exchanges, but also allows for a certain speed of action. Any delay in a project such as GoL is detrimental to its completion. The outsourcing of services for the Omeka part makes it difficult to redirect or modify the project, even slightly. At the same time, the concentration in one place of a set of skills acquired over time is a challenge in most of our musicological laboratories. This question is related to the one of obsolescence already mentioned, but it also raises the more fundamental question of how to think about a certain kind of musicological work. And this musicological work is at the same time a resource for researchers and performers, professionals and amateurs, but also a contribution to musicology as a science of data (like other disciplines such as archaeology, linguistics, etc.). Without this data science perspective, musicology risks not having a constructive (and strong) dialogue with the world of cultural and creative industries. This would be a missed opportunity, as the current cultural landscape is being visibly reconfigured.

GoL requires the mobilisation of skills and resources. It also implies the building of a community. One failure of GoL is certainly that it has not taken the time to build a community of interest. The fault lies with its producers, who did not take care to build a network. At the same time, a Gesualdo network here, a Janequin network there, would only have accentuated the fragmentation of the field of "Renaissance musicology" and thus accelerated the process of fatigue. The need for concertation between digital publishing projects is therefore becoming ever more urgent. It is not only a question of agreeing on a data management model; it seems necessary to project editorial achievements into an institutionally sustainable future.

Interpreters have made use of this resource, whether they say so or not: it is intended to be open to all. Of particular note is the recording of the first book of the Cantiones Sacrae by the Odhecaton ensemble conducted by Paolo Da Col (Ricercar, 2014), which has taken over the GoL edition. Marc Busnel's renditions of the second book of the Cantiones Sacrae were recorded by La Main Harmonique under the direction of Frédéric Betous (Ligia, 2015). On the other hand, the publishers of Baerenreiter's monumental Gesualdo have remained silent about the digital resource. A quick comparison, however, does not deny the GoL enterprise. Certainly, the site does not provide the kind of information and analysis found in the introductions to Baerenreiter's volumes. On the other hand, as far as musical and textual data are concerned, GoL can claim to provide musicologists and performers with the necessary elements for stylistic analysis or for creating a recording according to the artistic choices of the musical ensembles.

GoL has required many hours of work by musicologists trained in palaeography and music philology. Given the current state of technological development, one could imagine seemingly faster solutions. The first would be to digitise existing editions in order to have a starting point. It is not certain that this would save time: meticulous re-reading would take as many hours as direct encoding. Above all, this digitisation would be the image of an edition that responds to the principle of authority that GoL precisely questions. The ideal would be a scanning system that could quickly take into account the graphic peculiarities of the sources, in order to have, within a reasonable time, a series of files, each one representing a diplomatic edition. It would then be necessary to work with superimposition systems, as Laurent Pugin and Mauro Calcagno have imagined with Luca Marenzio (http://www.marenzio.org/index.xhtml). This stage is still only a prototype, but it is undoubtedly the one that seems to be the most financially sustainable in a more or less near future.

Beyond the issues of transcription, beyond the work of evaluating the sources, beyond the technical issues of the information contained in the MEI files, it is perhaps a broader issue that the GoL experiment should address. The cost of a digital publishing enterprise implies the mobilisation of resources that are not easily acquired. This kind of publishing also implies a collective participation that crosses the skills of musicologists and performers, scholars and amateurs. Despite these resources and the mobilisation of skills that are clearly complementary, GoL has struggled to find its audience. It would undoubtedly be appropriate to question the design of the digital edition. All the tools are available to navigate between a source and its visualisation in high definition, transcriptions accessible in interoperable formats, exceptional recordings available on platforms. We were all too quick to consider the question of ergonomics, of effectiveness in attracting the attention of Internet users of different backgrounds, when we developed GoL. We have learned to take care of printed works (typographic choices, covers, illustrations, balance of page fill, etc.). But we still don't do that for digital editions, or at least GoL doesn't.

In the 1950s and 1960s, musicologists debated the difficulty of making such prestigious collections as the Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae workable: impossible to put these large formats on desks, too many pages per piece for each voice. Finally, the musicologist would have limited his readership and the users of his work. Digital editions make it possible to avoid these reproaches, to open up to all types of users, from the researcher to the amateur, from the listener to the curious person seeking a musical experience rich in information. What digital publishing allows us to do today is to rethink the way we present a part of musicology that is not necessarily popular with the community, namely the valorisation of the musical heritage through editorial work.

  11 Franz Fischer, "Digital Classical Philology and the Critical Appartus," Digital Classical Philology: Ancient Greek and Latin in the DigitalRevolution , Saur, De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 203-2019.

	12 Christopher Ohge, Publishing Scholarly Editions. Archives, Computing, and Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge
	University Press, 2021.

13

There is not yet a practice guide for digital music publishing. The publication of a Digital Music Publishing Manual is in preparation within the framework of the MUSICA2 consortium of Huma-Num (https://musica.hypotheses.org/).

Person in charge 16 Workload Mission

	Marc Busnel	12 months at 65%	Restitution of missing parts
	Cristina Cassia	12 months at 80%	Music engraving/variants
	Alberto Napoli	3 months at 100%	Data editing
	Antoine Tanguy	8 months at 40%	Database model
	Marco Gurrieri:	3 months at 100%	Sib to MEI conversions
	Hyacinthe Belliot	6 months at 100%	Project management; source
			orders; Zotero bibliography
			creation and feeding; data
			alignment/revision under
			Dublin Core; preparation of
			xls./csv files for DB import;
			follow-up of Omeka CMS
			website creation.
	Vincent Besson	6 months at 100%	Project management;
			elaboration of the
			specifications; follow-up of
			the creation of the CMS
			Omeka website; processing
			and updating of Sib. files;
			processing and updating of
			Sib. conversions into MEI.

16

Hyacinthe Belliot and Vincent Besson are permanent CNRS research engineers at RICERCARLAB. The others have worked under a fixed-term contract, sometimes modulating their activity between several projects. Marc Busnel worked under a research engineer contract; the others, as study engineers.

There is no study of the sales of monumental editions. This assertion is based only on informal exchanges of information.

This workshop is the first of its kind and has spread widely. See again recently the work by Niels Berentsen: "Reimagining Ciconia's LacunaryBallate", Studi Musicali, 13 (2002) p.

7-48. See also Fabrice Fitch, Renaissance Polyphony (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Other initiatives have been carried out, such as the one led by Magnus Williamson at Newcastle University.7 Richard Freedman, Philippe Vendrix, "The Chansonniers of Nicolas Du Chemin: A Digital Forum for Renaissance Music Books", DieTonkunst, 5 (2011) p. 284-288.

Sacrarum cantionum Liber Primus. Quarum una septem vocibus, caeterae sex vocibus (Naples, Giovanni Pietro Cappuccio; Costantino Vitale, 1603); the volume containing the five-voice motets, published the same year, is complete. The restitution of the Madrigali a sei voci of 1626 is impossible: five of the six voices are missing. The only preserved voice has not been published on GoL.

This is not the first attempt to restore these motets. See James Wood, Gesualdo: Sacrae Cantiones II. An analysis towards reconstruction(Oxon, Vision Edition, 2014). This reconstruction resulted in a recording by the Vocalconsort Berlin conducted by Wood(Harmonia Mundi, 2013).

https://www.baerenreiter.com/fileadmin/Service_Allgemein/Werbemittel/deutsch/SPA274_Gesualdo_Pr osp_web.pdf

Most of the works mention, without providing precise data, the question of the environmental sustainability of digital productions.

Such an ambition requires an extension of the missions of university libraries that house the skills required to maintain specialized digital resources, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. This is a discussion to be deployed in as many institutions as possible, at the national and European levels. The project of a Cloud for European Heritage is undoubtedly an opportunity to do so for the "music" field.