There have been several attempts to improve the retrieval of symbolic music information by Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to increase the "searchability" of digital music libraries of early music prints and to facilitate the collection of data for musicological research. Their success has varied. This report describes a new online OMR system based upon industry-standard platforms to automate the encoding of early 17th-century music prints. Due to our research on composers of canons in early 17th-century Rome, we have used as a test case the early music prints of Paolo Agostini. Agostini was maestro di cappella at St Peter's Basilica and the most active exponent of advanced contrapuntal techniques, especially canon, in Rome in the 1620s. We developed a digital tool to process images of Agostini's printed music and to classify 7,092 automatically selected objects according to 38 music symbols using supervised learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN). The resulting system, IntelliOMR, exhibits up to an average of 99% accuracy for classifying unseen items after 50 training epochs. It has proven effective for rapidly encoding all of Agostini's works in the Music Encoding Initiative's XML format for a critical edition and computer-assisted musical analysis. The approach and design of this digital tool offer significant opportunities for enhancing digital library systems and for future research projects investigating digital corpora of early printed music. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Sound and music computing; • Humancentered computing → Collaborative and social computing; • Information systems → Data encoding and canonicalization.
BY JASON STOESSEL* IN AN ARTICLE WITTILY ENTITLED 'The End of the Ars Subtilior' David Fallows observes that music theorists continue to discuss, and composers occasionally use, notational and stylistic elements associated with the ars subtilior over the course of the fifteenth century. 1 While it is agreed that the years roughly between 1380 and 1415 witness the apogee of the so-called ars subtilior style on either side of the Alps, Fallows argues for the existence of continuities in musical and notational practices, offering up a foil to any attempt to periodize this style. For music historians, this situation is not surprising in the light of later musical parallels like, for example, the final flowering of the North
In the years before his death, Johannes Ciconia (1370?–1412) set to music several poems penned by the young Venetian humanist Leonardo Giustinian. One of the earliest of these settings is Con lagreme bagnandome el viso. This article proposes that both the poem and its setting by Ciconia operate within the emotional community of early humanists active at Padua in the decades around the year 1400. The public funeral oratory of one of the high-profile humanists active in this community in Padua, Pier Paolo Vergerio, reveals a renewed interest in ancient rhetoric that was instrumental in the development of new modes of self-expression within this emotional community. Different types of musical repetition in Ciconia's setting of Con lagreme serve as musical analogues to rhetorical figures of pathos witnessed in the orations of Vergerio.
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