[MEI-L] Music and Digital Humanities: Today (9. March): Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl; 16. March: Frauke Jürgensen

[David M. Weigl]

Reminder: Distinguished Lecture Series in Music and Digital Humanities

https://iwk.mdw.ac.at/music-dh

Today's lecture in the Distinguished Lecture Series on Music and Digital 
Humanities taking place at the mdw — University of Music and Performing 
Arts Vienna will be given by Chanda VanderHart (Krems/mdw) and David M. 
Weigl (mdw):

"'Hand in Hand': Adventures in Interdisciplinary Digital Musicology"

The lecture will start at 17:00 (Vienna/CET). As always, it will be 
streamed via Zoom, and both in-person and remote participation is free.
Note that Vienna is still in the CET timezone (no switch to DST yet).

Please refer to https://iwk.mdw.ac.at/music-dh for instructions on 
joining us!

--

The following lecture will be held on 16 March 2026, 17:00 (Vienna/CET).
Change in programme: as Frans Wiering (Utrecht University) has 
unfortunately been prevented from joining us, Frauke Jürgensen (mdw) has 
kindly agreed to swap presentation slots with him, and will present next 
Monday (16 March). Prof. Wiering will thus join us on 4 May, 2026.

Frauke Jürgensen (mdw): "Reconstructing Renaissance Improvisation 
Pedagogy using Symbolic Music Analysis Tools and Practice-Informed Analysis"

Symbolic analysis involves representing music through symbols such as 
letters and numbers, which can then be processed by a computer using the 
same type of pattern matching tools that one might use to process plain 
text-based data sets. This approach has a long history within 
computer-aided music analysis, and Renaissance music has been central 
since the 1970s and earlier (see Trowbridge et al.). More lately, 
machine learning approaches have been a natural expansion. The types of 
questions that are asked in such studies tend to involve identifying 
patterns of repetition, for example of compositional structures, musica 
ficta, ornamental patterns. In recent years, within the field of Early 
Music performance and compositional practice, the reconstruction of 
improvisation techniques has been an important area, transforming our 
understanding of the importance of improvisation pedagogy to the 
development of compositional technique and style. Treatises and 
collections of exercises are essential sources, as is analysis of 
composed pieces for the identification of improvisational models. 
Unfortunately, the largest collection of exercises for keyboard 
improvisation of the fifteenth century, the fundamenta and associated 
pieces of the Buxheim Organ Book, is not accompanied by written 
instructions for their use. From sixteenth-century sources such as 
Buchner's Fundamentum, we have an idea how to begin, but the intervening 
decades and structural differences mean that we cannot simply transplant 
the later set of instructions onto the earlier exercises. I approach 
this problem from two directions: through conventional and 
computer-aided analysis, I search for patterns of repetition that might 
suggest underlying schemata, while systematic practicing at the keyboard 
helps me both identify which analytic questions might be the most 
useful, and allows me to test hypotheses about the pedagogical process 
that emerge through the analyses.

Frauke Jürgensen, Professor of Music Theory in the Institute for 
Composition Studies and Music Production at the mdw, is a musician and 
musicologist. One of her main research areas is the performance and 
compositional practice of Renaissance music, using digital tools for 
music analysis. She has also translated a number of treatises, and is 
active as a singer and historical keyboard player.