crowdsourcing a music list

I’ve never been involved before in a project to crowdsource transcriptions. But I’ve long thought that Cathedral music lists would be a potentially valuable one. I even at one time tried to devise a TEI schema for them.

So I was delighted to be invited to play my part in transcribing Lichfield Cathedral music lists from the mid-19th century. There is a sensibly laid out interface where you choose a day of the week and are then offered a series of pages with that day highlighted and a form to fill in. You can do as much as you like – time prevents me from doing very many but in odd moments most weekends I transcribe a few; it’s more productive than frittering them away on the internet. The transcriptions are double-checked and there is a leader board of participants ordered by their number of correct contributions.

Cathedral music was very different then – sung Mattins every day with the Litany regularly. No breaks for school holidays, although the Cathedral was closed for cleaning for a week in September. No settings of the Responses, and the Canticles appear to have been sung to chants almost all the time (to judge by the composers’ names, unless they wrote canticle settings that have sunk without trace). Anthems are almost all on scriptural texts (apart from some settings of Collects) and in English. There’s not a huge sense of seasonal appropriateness – Christmas music for example turns up at other times of the year – and the custom of having more sombre repertoire on a Friday had not yet begun, although Fridays were commonly without organ. Nor are ‘big sings’ reserved for weekends. The anthem repertoire still relied heavily on the 18th century (I’d guess that the library had a set of Boyce’s Cathedral Music anthology) and also included many movements from oratorios. There is some music by Purcell and his contemporaries, and by Tudor composers, but it is limited, presumably because of a lack of printed editions. It is sad to think of the pieces this choir could have sung and didn’t! I look forward to searching the resulting database to explore these generalisations further.

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