(Digital) Philology for/of Multiple Creative Processes

Digital editions of music represent the fusion of musicology's longstanding focus on philological questions with the affordances of technological flexibility for data modelling, encoding, and presentation, along with possibilities for rapid and broad dissemination. Parallel to analogue musicological work, the focus remains on the concept of works and the identification and compilation of authoritative or definitive editions. Notably absent in both spheres are the contributions of performers and the acknowledgment that music is foremost a sounded entity rather than only a written one. Of course, exponentially more challenges exist for documenting the process of performance than the fixity of a written score. A first step in the direction of addressing some of these challenges still lies within the area of philology, albeit with a different purpose than has been conventional: an interpretations edition. Here, the goal is to account for diverse interpretive instructions appearing in a variety of score editions. In the case of project design, of course, a primary challenge is how to balance the usual plethora of editions against a corpus of recordings for interpretations-analysis. Curating the edition to the specific needs of a project thus becomes of paramount importance. More than exhibiting the conceptual variations by means of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) for this kind of work, this paper reinforces the importance of balancing technological development with best ethical practices of edition making as historiographical praxis.