Beethoven in the House: Digital Studies of Domestic Music Arrangements

Performance of music in the home was the means by which most works were received before the advent of audio recordings and broadcasts, yet the notation sources that form our primary record of this culture have not been the subject of comprehensive or methodical study. Choices made by arrangers adapting music for domestic consumption – of instrumentation, abbreviation, or simplification – reflect the musical life of the 19th century, and can inform our understanding alongside contemporary accounts such as newspapers, adverts, and diaries. This position paper gives the background, motivation, and proposed approach of research currently being undertaken within the Beethoven in the House project. This will include a study of Steiner editions of Beethoven’s 7th and 8th Symphonies and Wellingtons Sieg, making a detailed comparison between arrangements, systematically identifying a core common to multiple versions, and asking if this reflects the stated values of the publisher. A second survey will look for patterns across a larger sample of lesser-known and poorly catalogued scores, collating emergent indicators of arrangers’ motivations within a narrative of the domestic market – the music industry of its day. Both studies will innovate digital methods which characterise arrangements as music encodings, including ‘sparse’ approaches to notation and annotation.