The Virtual Score: Representation, Retrieval, Restoration (review)

The Virtual Score: Representation, Retrieval, Restoration. Edited by Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. (Computing in Musicology, 12.) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press; Stanford, Calif.: Center for Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities, 2001. [ix, 291 p. ISBN 0-262-58209-0. ISSN 1057-9478. $28.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, bibliographies, index.

This latest volume in the Computing in Musicology series from the Center for Computer-Assisted Research in the Humanities is a welcome one. As have previous volumes, it documents a variety of applications of computer technology to musical research, but in a way that reflects changes that have taken place in this field. No longer are reports of computer applications in music more promising than productive, written by computer mavens for the chosen few. Rather we have here reports from a variety of authors that document ways in which computer applications have reached far into the mainstream of musical scholarship. The contributors include such well-known scholars as Margaret Bent, Philip Brett, and Alejandro Enrique Planchart. If the likes of these are using computer-assisted techniques in their work, then the field has certainly matured.

The nineteen essays of The Virtual Score examine a variety of techniques for encoding musical scores and the applications that result from this. The book is divided into three sections, reflected in the subtitle: "Representation and Interchange" (ten essays), "Retrieval and Analysis" (three essays), and the "Virtual Restoration of Sources" (six essays). It is this last section in particular that demonstrates how powerful off-the-shelf software—principally Adobe Photoshop —can be used to aid traditional scholarship. The collaborative article by Andrew Wathey, Margaret Bent, and Julia Craig-McFeely on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, for instance, describes how digital editing techniques, such as adjusting black/white levels and color ranges or extracting and combining layers, can be used to restore notation previously considered illegible. Similarly Planchart describes the digital restoration of erased script and stain removal, and Dexter Edge describes techniques for the imaging of watermarks. Rounding out this section are articles on the collation of divergent printings in the music of William Byrd and digital facsimiles of Alban Berg sketches. The common thread here is that digital techniques can be used in a completely benign way to extract much more information from a digital copy than one can get from the original manuscript with the naked eye.

The opening section of the book, on the representation and interchange of musical information in the form of encoded scores, also displays in striking ways how computer applications in music are becoming more mainstream. The final essay in this section, by Don Anthony, Charles Cronin, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, surveys the various ways in which musical scores can be provided over the Web, either as images or using various encoding techniques, and includes a useful "copyright primer for electronic editors and users" (p. 137). The thirteen different models for the delivery and display of musical scores described include both Web-based and compact disc-based models, a variety of musical encoding techniques and imaging formats, proprietary as well as open-source formats, and both commercial and noncommercial projects. The availability of so much musical material from such a variety of sources is further evidence that the world of computer applications in music is entering the mainstream of musical life. Until recently, encoded music was well hidden behind the user interface of musical notation programs; it seems that online services are already dramatically expanding the role of the encoded score.

This section includes four articles on the representation of music using Extensible Markup Language (hereafter XML), a standard that is rapidly becoming the norm for many types of data definition and interchange. By adopting XML as the basis for score encoding, many of the powerful XML tools and technologies available for general applications can be used in support of XML-based music applications. The use of such a mainstream encoding method is further evidence that the encoded score may soon...