The Tasso in Music Project

Emiliano Ricciardi

Monday, September 13, 2021

We have received the following from Emiliano Ricciardi (Director and General Editor, Tasso in Music Project). The RISM catalog links to this project through the short title TiMP.

The Tasso in Music Project is a public-access digital edition of the early modern musical settings of the poetry of Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), arguably the most prominent literary figure in late sixteenth-century Italy. The project features newly made critical editions of the over 700 extant settings produced between c. 1570 and 1640, representing the work of over 200 composers of different geographic provenance, ranging from Sicily to Denmark.

The editions are encoded in Humdrum software and are available for online consultation through Verovio, a recently developed vector system for the online visualization of music. The editions are available for consultation and download in several other formats, ranging from PDF to MEI, and are accompanied by tools that facilitate analysis of the repertoire, with an emphasis on music/text relations.

The project also features a substantial literary component, with diplomatic transcriptions of the poetic texts as they appear in musical and literary sources, both manuscript and printed, encoded in TEI and with automatic collation of variant readings across sources. The raw data for the project is available through a Github open-access repository.

The project is directed by Emiliano Ricciardi (UMass Amherst) and Craig Sapp (Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, Stanford University) and realized in collaboration with a team of scholars from the North America and Europe. It has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant, 2016-19), the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Centro di Studi Tassiani (Bergamo, Italy).

Through its features, the project addresses a wide audience encompassing scholars and performers of early music, literary philologists, and more generally anyone with an interest in the intersection of music and poetry in the early modern period.

Category: Electronic resources