by Sabra Statham, Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

When I completed my Ph.D. in Music from CUNY Graduate Center in February of 2009 I felt energized.  I immediately embarked on my next project, one I had decided upon even before I finished my dissertation. I had produced a documentary study of letters exchanged between composers and publishers who had worked for the music publishing firm Universal Edition A.G. before WWII, most of whom had emigrated to the United States by 1938. I was interested in exploring how market forces and the interests of the publishing companies had shaped the music of these composers between 1938 and 1965. This was essentially a question of canon development as Universal Edition published almost every important composer of the twentieth century. In the end I produced an annotated edition of letters by composers Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, George Antheil, Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek and publishers Hans Heinsheimer, Hugo Winter, Felix Greissle and Ralph Hawkes.

Although I had begun with the goal of writing a history, I instead ended up editing and annotating a collection of letters because nothing spoke as well as the documents themselves to the issues I had raised. And while they were all interesting, none were as compelling as those by George Antheil, an American-born composer whose career took off in 1920s Paris and Berlin.  There he was acclaimed for his “Bad Boy” image and avante garde mechanistic music. In 1933, with the rise of fascism and the collapse of the European economy, he returned to the United States. He moved to Los Angeles, transforming himself into a Hollywood composer who made his living by writing film scores –- and began composing in a more neoclassic style. Antheil was charming and well-spoken and traveled among the rich, famous, and talented. His letters were long, culturally rich, full of emotion, and detailed. Everyone who read my dissertation talked about Antheil’s letters.

So I decided to make my first project a book that would be the selected correspondence of George Antheil. No one had done it, the letters were fantastic, and Antheil was enjoying a rediscovery. I began making plans and started examining grants. I soon ended up with a copy of an NEH Fellowship application in hand. The date for applications had passed but it was something to think about — especially the part that said all things being equal they favored projects that had a digital component.

That got me thinking. I had dealt extensively with online resources doing my research and had worked with the Arnold Schoenberg archive online (it was actually coming online as I did my work). I thought that maybe I could do the same thing, build an online database of Antheils’ letters, after the book was finished. That would be great, but it had to work better than the Schoenberg archive. I had used it and while I didn’t know how it was done, I knew what I liked and what I didn’t like. I wanted search functions, and I wanted the paragraphs and sections of the letters to look like the originals when I printed them , and I wanted to be able to read marginalia, and perhaps more.

I had no idea, of course, how to do this.  There were few models in musicology and no training for it at my graduate school.  One day while web surfing I happened upon a site by a group named Documents Compass. I sent an email. In my experience, these sorts of queries ordinarily go unanswered, but Holly Shulman responded, and it wasn’t long before we met. She liked the project, and began to put some of her own energy into it. Looking back, I think the topic had personal relevance for her. Moreover, I found Documents Compass wonderful: they have energy and imagination combined with technical knowledge and a deep professionalism.  Work began.

This past summer I became a  fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.  I come from Charlottesville, so it was easy for me to spend time there this past summer, familiarizing myself with digital editing tools, researching grants, and meeting people at a lot of lunches. By the end of the summer the project was well defined enough that I could apply for grants from NEH, ACLS, and NHPRC with some level of knowledge about how the technology would work. The project I had only begun to imagine four months previously was now “launched” and I had confidence that it would, at least eventually, be produced and published. Moreover, I could see that this was only the beginning of my entry into the digital world.

As I think about my future, I believe that my work with the Antheil Edition has opened up a whole new side to my scholarly work. I have found that working with the digital medium has stimulated my creative sense. My ideas are no longer limited to pages of typeset essays and footnotes, with an occasional photograph or facsimile — a sparkle of freedom from the confines of black and white Times New Roman 12 pt. With the electronic medium I have to think about aesthetics, functionality, and interest of my electronic edition. It also opens up new doors to collaborative work, which for me has always been an interest. The technology naturally invites projects that involve multiple people, in various locations, working with diverse materials and the potential to bring ideas and objects together in an online work site. I have begun exploring different tools that I have recently located including TextGrid, Pliny, Eclipse, and PubMan. After sending a query via the American Musicological Society (AMS) Listserv I have become part of a little study group whose goal is to do some sketch studies on Antheil using TextGrid.

Other issues have now begun to surface as well. The most imperative within the musicological community is their lack of engagement with digital technology. There are some exceptions, a few fantastic digital projects are going on and some online editions.  But we lag far behind other branches of the humanities in our digital output. The main focus for the musicological community has been digitizing manuscripts for study. I believe it is significant that out of 1500 musicologists on the AMS list, only two responded that they had knowledge of TextGrid and one of those was a German (the home of TextGrid) scholar.  There may well be others who did not respond for a host of reasons, but still I was surprised. There is no AMS study group on digital issues and to my knowledge there will be only one paper at the 2009 national conference that deals with scholarship in the digital world. Moreover, we not only lag far behind other fields in the humanities but also far behind our European counterparts who seem to be more actively engaged in digital technology than Americans.

The other major issue my project has raised is dissemination. How will my electronic work be “published”?  Fortunately I have already had some good conversations with a few university presses. But publication by a university press won’t satisfy the expectation that online scholarship should be free of charge. Nor do my potential answers help smaller projects find solutions.

I can see that there is a circular pattern here. The medium shapes the project and the project shapes the medium. That is how it has played out in my case.  The NEH “mandate” that I publish digitally shaped my project. Without the suggestion that I go digital, I would not have approached the full correspondence nor extended the Antheil project to include other composers so it can blossom into a networked project. If scholars do not have any incentive to produce digitally they probably won’t take up the challenge.  And if  musicologists do not have an online venue through which to publish their work, then they won’t develop projects that take advantage of the technology. And that would be a loss to scholarship. We must develop more ways to publish material and encourage collaborative work environments. And these must extend beyond e-books, or bringing journals online, but include venues that invite diverse ways of thinking about presenting material and different ways of doing work together or alone in a digital world.

As I said, I am just at the beginning of my career and at the threshold of my entry into the digital world. But I believe that the internet, the world wide web, and the technology it brings is powerful. It will shape my scholarly work and my scholarly career.

Editors’ note:  We have included a brief description of the George Antheil Digital Edition.

The George Antheil Digital Edition (GADE) will be the first complete edition of all the known correspondence of the twentieth-century American composer George Antheil. The edition will be published electronically and will feature a user-friendly interface which will allow scholars to search the database by name, date, term, topic, work and place. In addition, the edition will feature biographical and thematic essays, editorial notes, and scholarly bibliographies. Annotations will be accessed via pop up windows and hyperlinks. Unlike paper editions that can only accommodate text, the electronic edition will allow for the addition of sound, image, and notation to the annotation panes that accompany the letters.

The GADE will be prepared using a unique FileMaker Pro database that allows for accessioning, editing, and tagging of the documents all in the same software system. All correspondence will be output as fully tagged XML documents that will be exported to the publisher for publication. The same FileMaker Pro database records all of the steps in the editing process. It generates an individual record for each document, an original ID number for each annotation tag, aligns facsimile images with the corresponding transcriptions, and records the date and time of all editorial activity. There will also be a letter press edition of the Selected Letters of George Antheil.

While publishing options are being considered for the GADE, options for free and open access will continue to be explored.

It is hoped that the final phase of this project will be an extended set of related editions that  will be cross referenced and interoperable and published in a series alongside the correspondence of George Antheil.  Located in one virtual space, scholars would be able to search multiple archives all at one time while enabling the gleaning of data to study name authority, social networks, and chronologies. This last phase of the project is tentatively called Mahagonny, after the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny by Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht.

Sabra Statham holds the Ph.D. in Music from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York as well as the M.Mus. in Violin Performance and the M.A. in Music Theory and History from Pennsylvania State University.  Her dissertation is forthcoming by Georg Olms Verlag as part of the series Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft.