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College news
18 February 2004
Birthday launch of Chopin's First Editions Online
A new research project to establish an online virtual collection of
the first editions of Chopin's music will be launched on the composer's
birthday, 1 March. The £320k scheme, funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Board (AHRB), will make it possible to view and study these
important primary sources on the Internet, thanks to innovative technical
methodologies and advanced imaging techniques. This will be the very
first complete archive of these editions, which are scattered around
the world in disparate libraries and private collections.
John Rink, Professor of Music and Head of the Department of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, is leading the project, which will run from 1 March 2004 to 28 February 2007. Additional input will be provided by Harold Short and Marilyn Deegan of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, and three Research Assistants will also be employed. With collaboration from four partner libraries - the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library and Chopin Society, Warsaw - and contributions from 18 other international libraries, an estimated total of 4,345 hi-tech digital images (i.e. 273 scores in total) of the Chopin first editions from the 1820s onwards will be digitised and mounted for display on the Internet. The full score of each original impression will be shown along with essential catalogue information and a commentary on significant textual discrepancies. A sophisticated system of musical and textual interlinking will also be developed in addition to a search facility, to provide access to other relevant non-musical data.
According to John Rink, "The Chopin sources pose particularly difficult challenges to both scholars and musicians because of their diversity and inconsistency, and also because of the practical constraints that make it difficult to study them systematically. This is true of both manuscripts and printed editions alike - particularly the latter, given the many different impressions produced in succession over the years, all of which purport to be "first editions" but not all of which would have received Chopin's seal of approval. Until these editions have been thoroughly analysed and conclusions drawn, Chopin's output cannot be understood in its historical context nor its content accurately reproduced in any modern edition. The very identity of the Chopin work is at stake."
Chopin's First Editions Online (to be known as CFEO) has evolved from a previous four-year Leverhulme funded research programme, completed in 2001, which traced all of Chopin's first editions to establish their chronology and analyse the complex inter-relationships between them, culminating in Christophe Grabowski and John Rink's Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004). The online collection aims to take this research one step further. It is the first time a composer's music has been comprehensively assembled in this way, making the project exemplary in the study of music and promising to create a resource of unparalleled importance and scholarly potential providing wider access to musicians and musicologists alike.
Professor John Rink studied
at Princeton University, King's College London and the University of
Cambridge, where his doctoral research was on the evolution of tonal
structure in Chopin's early music and its relation to improvisation.
He specialises in the fields of performance studies, theory and analysis,
and nineteenth-century studies, and has produced three edited books
for Cambridge University Press: Chopin Studies 2 (1994; with Jim Samson),
The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (1995)
and Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (2002). He has also
published a Cambridge Music Handbook entitled Chopin: The Piano Concertos
(1997), which draws upon his experience in performing these works.
ENDS
For further information contact:
Royal Holloway, University of London Press Office:
Christine Long
Press & PR Officer
01784 443967
christine.long@rhul.ac.uk
