Theodor Dumitrescu (Universiteit Utrecht / UC Davis), Project Director

Marnix van Berchum (Universiteit Utrecht), Associate Director

International Advisory Board

Welcome to the CMME Project, a scholarly initiative to offer free online access to new, high-quality early music scores produced by today's leading experts. Based at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the project represents a collaborative development effort of specialists in musicology, information science, and music retrieval. The major purpose of the enterprise is to produce and maintain an online corpus of electronic editions, in addition to software tools making them accessible to students, scholars, performers, and interested amateurs. Here, the brilliant polyphonic styles known to the modern world through the works of such masters as Dufay, Josquin, Machaut, Palestrina, and Tallis can come to life again in the central medium of the 21st century.

The CMME Project is not associated in any way with the printed series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, the American Institute of Musicology, or A-R Editions. It is a research project funded in the past by organizations in France and the Netherlands, and currently housed at Utrecht University.

Latest news:
October 2012: CMME source code publicly available
In a long-overdue move supporting the CMME Project's commitment to open-source software, we've made the Java source code of the CMME notation tools available online under the GNU General Public License. With the program's code in hand, software developers can modify and extend it, as long as any derivative versions are themselves kept open-source. The code is available on Github.

January 2011: Grant for "The Other Josquin"
The CMME Project has been awarded a grant from the Dutch digital incentives organization SURFfoundation for the editorial project The Other Josquin: Music Excluded from the New Josquin Edition. Work on the project will run from February to June 2011 in collaboration with Jesse Rodin's Josquin Research Project at Stanford University, producing editions of 40 sacred compositions once ascribed to Josquin des Prez. The first editions are scheduled to appear online at the start of May 2011.

May 2010: Projects and software
Among the projects now scheduled for online publication over the coming years, we welcome Denis Collins's transcription of the massive canon collection by George Waterhouse (over 1000 compositions to be published gradually on the site), as well as an edition by Pyrros Bamichas of masses by Padovano and contemporaries, taken from 16th-century Munich sources. See the Editorial Projects page.

The CMME transcription software, currently in version .94 beta, will soon be available on this site, entirely free of charge, as well as in an open-source repository to make the source code freely available for further communal contribution. Among the latest features is Import from MusicXML, facilitating the process of importing scores made with other software such as Finale and Sibelius.

July 2009: Editions in progress added
Two newly-started edition projects are now online in incipient stages (see the Editorial Projects page). The Sacred Music of Jachet Berchem will cover the liturgical and Latin-texted output of the Netherlandish master, and the edition of The Bayeux Manuscript offers encodings of a crucial repertory of 15th-century monophonic chansons. Both projects will be updated regularly with new scores.

March 2009: New editions
There is now an area for miscellaneous individual editions, not connected with larger editorial projects. Some sample editions in progress are already available for your enjoyment (compositions by Josquin, Mouton, Okeghem, and the most prolific of composers, 'Anonymous').

December 2008: Occo Codex Edition
The complete edition of the Occo Codex is now online and publicly available for free, with a major update to the software bringing a dynamically configurable Critical Apparatus system as well as audio playback of editions (for usage instructions, see the Documentation page). Enjoy!

June 2007: Forthcoming projects
We're pleased to announce two new forthcoming editorial projects which expand the scope of the CMME in various ways. A communal edition of the famous "Occo Codex" by a number of Utrecht musicologists is scheduled for appearance by the end of 2007, bringing with it a step into more complex philological situations with many variant readings in individual works. Meanwhile, Karl Kügle's transcriptions of music from the Brussels Rotulus mark a step into the field of 14th-century Ars Nova repertory.

Recent updates to the Viewer software: score files are now compressed for faster downloading; new toolbar icons control score-visualization options (cleffing, texting style, etc.)

December 2006: CMME beta version .80
The long-awaited first public release is here. With the publication of A Choirbook for Henry VIII and His Sisters, Theodor Dumitrescu's edition of the music in manuscript Royal 11 E.xi of the British Library, CMME Project 1 is now available worldwide and free of charge.

September 2006: Arrival in Utrecht
After a fruitful and pleasant period of development support by le STUDIUM in association with the Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (Université François Rabelais - Tours), the project has moved to its new home at Utrecht University. From 2006 to 2009, new work on the project is being supported by a grant from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research).

Why online editions?
Edition projects and "meta-data"
Structure
A brief history
Some further reading
Screenshots
FAQ

Why online editions?

The CMME is a response to a growing academic and social need for a high-quality, intellectually robust and well-implemented system for the electronic publication of early music scores. The increasing financial difficulties of traditional printed publication models call for the creation of such a system, both for the long-term continuation of scholarly edition production and for the availability of musicological research results to a broad audience. Through a "freeware" approach to components (both software and musical data), the project is aimed specifically at removing economic and cultural barriers which often keep scholarly music editions within university boundaries, out of easy reach for most non-specialist users.

Ease of distribution and financial advantages, however, are by no means the only or even the most important motivations behind electronic editions. For centuries, the physical characteristics of printed books have subtly shaped our understanding and structuring of written information. Now with the advent of modern information technology - multimedia, hyperlinked structures, semantic data markup - our reliance on traditional publication models is diminishing daily. Electronic editions are not printed books, and they need not be bound by the same physical constraints. They should be configurable, searchable, susceptible to analyses which are prohibitively time-consuming or impossible with a simple printed text. The reader should be able to look at texts and music in whichever format is most appropriate to the moment.

Without the need for a single fixed visual form on a printed page, a computerized edition system can utilize one editor's transcription to create any number of visual forms and variant versions. The result is an entirely new form of critical music edition in which dynamically generated, user-configured formats remove the unwieldiness of multiple printed editions, replacing it with the concept of multiple states of a single edition. The early music editor's task returns to the truly critical aspects of interpreting the text, rather than the ultimately unsatisfactory process of making presentation decisions which must limit the usability of the edition.

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Edition projects and "meta-data"

Conceptualizing the CMME specifically as an electronic publication system, rather than a typical "database," calls for a different set of expectations and modes of interaction. The music editions which populate the CMME corpus do not represent an anonymous mass of information punched in by disinterested data-entry workers; these are fresh editions, produced from primary source materials by musicological experts and kept at a high standard by our international board of editorial advisors. The reader of Shakespeare or Chaucer expects an edition which has been prepared with great care and knowledge acquired through study and experience, as does the performer of Lassus motets. There is no reason to waive these same requirements in online editorial endeavors.

These principles of scholarly arbitration and peer review remain an important element in the formation of CMME "Editorial Projects." Corresponding in many ways to a volume in a printed edition series, an editorial project gathers up a collection of related compositions to be presented under the guidance of one editor or editorial group - for example, the contents of a single manuscript, the complete works of one composer, or a set of pieces known to come from a single court or city. As with any publication of early materials built on sound scholarly standards, a CMME edition provides the user with an introduction by the music's editors illuminating the historical, musical, and analytical context of the edition's contents. The web pages for individual compositions offer further commentary specific to each work.

Beyond the set of editorial projects, however, users will quickly encounter a wider array of information in the Database section concerning musical sources, composers, and compositions which are not yet represented by music editions in the CMME. This network of contextual information - "meta-data," because it is not the music data itself, but rather a set of data about that data - allows readers to explore the broader environment of the music editions in the corpus. Which other works are contained in the same sources? Who are the composers represented therein? The CMME meta-data collection limits itself largely to the one major element which is missing from the standard reference works on 15th- and 16th-century sources: the listing of actual contents, giving the names and composers of all compositions and their locations in the sources. More detailed forms of meta-data about compositions and manuscripts are available from the Motet Online database, the Base chanson, and DIAMM, for those who wish to explore further, and soon this information will form part of a large centralized data pool. Plans are in the works for the institution of a large-scale cooperative effort between the CMME, Base chanson, DIAMM, and Motet Online projects for the creation of a shared meta-data repository upon which each project can draw with its own goals and interfaces.

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Structure

Encompassing all of the stages in the online publishing process, from initial transcription to final distribution, the CMME acts as a complete system composed of the following elements:

Knowledge of the details of the CMME representation format (the way the scores are structured and stored electronically) is entirely unnecessary in order to use the system. Experts in both musicology and information retrieval, however, will recognize the usefulness of having musical score data available in the transparent, human-readable format offered by XML markup, which puts CMME scores at the disposition even of users who do not wish to employ our software. The formal specification is publicly available (in XML Schema) here, but this scheme is subject to change without notice during the current development phase (particularly as we modify the format to include different dialects of mensural notation). When the format has reached a stable state in 2009, a more verbose description of the standard will be made public.

The Java programs for creating and viewing scores offer users the advantages of a straightforward, platform-independent software experience. To view the scores in the online CMME repository, there is no need to install any special software from us; any modern web browser with support for Java applets (including the current versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari) will handle the software automatically, whether running under Windows, MacOS, Unix, etc. For those who wish to create their own scores with the CMME Editor tool, a beta version may be obtained by contacting the developers. After the current period of interface development and user-feedback analysis, a more finalized version of the CMME Editor will be made directly available for download on this site. Eventually the entire source code and specifications of the programs will be accessible under an open source licence.

The web interface is intended to provide simple, unrestricted access to our collection of music editions, while situating these in a broader manuscript/print context to facilitate exploration of source materials. As mentioned above, the CMME repository of meta-data (contents listings of manuscripts, biographical information on composers, contextual historical information on compositions, etc.) will soon form part of a large multi-project dataset shared with DIAMM, the Motet Online Database, and the Base chanson. Each project has its own needs, and provides different modes of presenting and manipulating this underlying information. As far as the CMME is concerned, an uncomplicated and easily-understood interface will remain in place to guide users to the project's key element: our music transcriptions. Created by scholars and musicians who are professional-level experts in the repertories of their specific Editorial Projects, these are the first online early music editions truly compatible with the demands of 21st-century publication.

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A brief history

Conference appearances of the CMME:

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Some further reading

Theodor Dumitrescu, "Corpus Mensurabilis Musice 'Electronicum': Toward a Flexible Electronic Representation of Music in Mensural Notation," in The Virtual Score: Representation, Retrieval, Restoration, ed. Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Computing in Musicology 12 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 3-18.

Theodor Dumitrescu and Marnix van Berchum, "The CMME Occo Codex Edition: Variants and Versions in Encoding and Interface," in Digitale Edition zwischen Experiment und Standardisierung: Musik - Text - Codierung, ed. Peter Stadler and Joachim Veit (Beihefte zu Editio; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009), pp. 129-146.

Eleanor Selfridge-Field, "XML Applications in Music Scholarship," in Music Analysis East and West, ed. Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Computing in Musicology 14 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 21-40.

Joachim Veit, "Musikwissenschaft und Computerphilologie - eine schwierige Liaison?" Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 7 (2005).

Links

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Screenshots

CMME Viewer applet: choose how you want our scores to appear



CMME Editor: transcription in an early-notation environment



View music in unscored separate parts as it appears in the sources



Support for notational features such as arbitrary proportions and colors






Easily visualize variant readings, both on the score and in a configurable critical apparatus window

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Frequently-asked questions

Do I need to pay to use the CMME?
Do I need to register myself to use the CMME?
How do you plan to make money from the CMME?
How can I contribute editions to the database?
Why do you have listings for manuscripts and compositions which have not yet been edited for the CMME database?

Features
What are the next features to be added to the system?
Will feature X or Y be introduced in the future?

Technical issues
Do I need to install special software to view CMME editions?
What format do you use for storing the musical data of CMME editions? Are the formal specifications publicly available?
Can I download the score files to view/analyze on my own computer?

Do I need to pay to use the CMME?
No. Everything in the database - editions, meta-data, text - is openly available and free of charge.

Do I need to register myself to use the CMME?
No, you can look at the Database and editions directly. In the future, we plan to offer an optional system with which you can save your own viewing/database configurations and control a personal workspace, which will require you to create a (free) user account.

How do you plan to make money from the CMME?
We don't. Development work on the software and system infrastructure is supported through academic grants, and music-editing work is carried out by individual scholars on a project-by-project basis. We feel that restricting access to electronic resources by charging individuals and institutions significantly reduces the social utility of online information distribution.

How can I contribute editions to the database?
The CMME Advisory Board is responsible for deciding which editions are of a suitable scholarly standard to enter the public repository. Our transcriptions are all produced from primary sources by experts in the chosen repertories. If you wish to submit a proposal for an edition project, please contact us for further details.

Why do you have listings for manuscripts and compositions which have not yet been edited for the CMME database?
The idea of including meta-data for a much wider array of works than has currently been edited is to facilitate the user's exploration of the source context of works which they would normally encounter as isolated scores. See the discussion above.

Features

What are the next features to be added to the system?
A wide array of new capabilities is envisioned for the future development of the CMME system. At the current moment, the extensions and features we're working on include the following:
* Options for score visualization in fully modern notation
* Individualized online user workspaces
* Automated music/incipit searching

Will feature X or Y be introduced in the future?
This is the most common set of questions received about the CMME. The potential of computerized editions to offer new modes of interaction with musical materials is nearly limitless, and understandably many users have ideas for new elements they would like to see introduced. Our current development schedule has set in place a broad outline of features to be created through 2009, but individual ideas are always welcome; simply use the feedback form on this site.

Technical issues

Do I need to install special software to view CMME editions?
In most cases, no. Modern web browsers with built-in support for Java applets will open the CMME Viewer automatically when you click on a "View score" link. Otherwise, you will need to download and install Sun's Java runtime system for use with your web browser.

What format do you use for storing the musical data of CMME editions? Are the formal specifications publicly available?
The CMME format is a dialect of XML tailored specifically to representing music in mensural notation (and converting it automatically to various forms of modern notation). The formal specification is available here in XML Schema, but as mentioned above, this format will be changing without notice over the next few years.

Can I download the score files to view/analyze on my own computer?
The XML file (.cmme.xml) for every score is available on the database page for that individual composition, through the link entitled "XML score data." To obtain a standalone application version of the CMME Viewer (for viewing score files from your local filesystem, rather than our website), please contact us.

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Consult the score database.

The CMME Project is not associated in any way with the printed series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, the American Institute of Musicology, or A-R Editions. It is a research project funded in the past by organizations in France and the Netherlands, and currently housed at Utrecht University.