European endeavours: the EarlyMuse working group in Bratislava

In mid-March 2025, I travelled to Bratislava to join a meeting of working groups from EarlyMuse, a 4-year initiative that seeks to strengthen the place of early music research across Europe. EarlyMuse is funded by The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), which funds ‘Actions’ to create interdisciplinary research networks that bring together researchers across different sectors to investigate a topic. Launched in September 2022, EarlyMuse is the first musicological COST action. It aims to develop ‘a new ecosystem of early music’ via investigations by five working groups, focused on education, sources, publication, performance, and policy.  

Photos courtesy of EarlyMuse, Mr. Robert Erent (University Library Bratislava)

The meeting in Bratislava was for the working groups on sources and policies. I was placed in the group on sources, working with eight other members to draft a document concerning Musicology as a Data Science. Our goal was to develop new frameworks for understanding what musicological data comprises and how it is mediated by humans and machines.  

We first established broad groups of questions and statements of principle regarding musicological data, and organised these into sections. We then refined these questions and principles through debate and through populating each section with specifics. The debates could be as broad-ranging as ‘what is the scope of musical data?’ and as specific as finding the precise word to encompass an idea or action; for example, we extensively debated whether to use the word ‘transforming’, ‘rendering’, ‘interpreting’, or ‘visualising’ when discussing what we do today with data for musicology.  

By asking ‘what is music data?’, we established when and how music heritage becomes data, acknowledging that such data is never ‘raw’. Sound being ephemeral, all music data is an encoding of a temporal physical experience in a defined space; it is thus inherently mediated, or ‘cooked’, in some way. We then established two fundamental types of music data - ‘potential’ and ‘actual’ - and proposed the scope of music data as comprising information pertaining to eight broad themes: (1) biographical data; (2) symbolic representation; (3) physicality; (4) text; (5) authority; (6) access information; (7) audio data; and (8) visual data.  

Working group 2 (sources) meeting - photos courtesy of EarlyMuse, Mr. Robert Erent (University Library Bratislava)

We then explored ways of formatting music data digitally and physically. Finally, we provided guidance for identifying the context of music data in the form of questions, designed to help researchers avoid reliance on assumed inherent hierarchies regarding data types. Our approaches to processes for data collection concerned how to form parameters, with guiding principles based on whether the musicologist works with data about music or music as data. These in turn can be understood as ‘known’ (data available in digital or material form) or ‘endangered or at-risk’ data (data that remains unidentified and/or inaccessible). Developing approaches to the latter were particularly vital, given the social and ethical implications of collecting and working with this data. 

Joint working groups 2 and 5 meeting - photos courtesy of EarlyMuse, Mr. Robert Erent (University Library Bratislava)

In terms of what we do with music data, we established that our primary actions today concern organising data by creating formal and subject descriptions (metadata), citing data to make claims, and enriching or extending music data sets. Future actions using music data will still engage with these themes, but may engage with digital tools in ways that prompt more questions, rather than fewer. Establishing wider literacies on digital technologies and data processing will be vital to this approach, necessitating closer integration with cultural and creative industries and engagement with EU initiatives in cultural heritage. 

The most fundamental philosophical issue we tackled was how to consider heritage as musicological data and musicological data as heritage. By engaging with this issue throughout, our guidelines highlighted how the question of what ‘heritage’ is sometimes better understood by what it is not. Our guidelines comprise a starting point for pursuing a strategic goal of undermining previous research paradigms that built static narratives that were in turn imposed, in a wide variety of ways, on locations and musical communities, both today and historically. 

The work of the Music, Heritage, Place team  was very informative for the discussions in Bratislava. EarlyMuse working group members collectively agreed that musicology as a field should recognise that we get the most out of historical music sources by engaging with localised ‘heritage’ infrastructure (such as county record offices) and the people that act within it. Our work thus far has shown the effectiveness of valuing input by local history enthusiasts and early music enthusiasts. There is much to learn by sharing research strategies and debates across national borders, and it was a pleasure to be a part of that exchange on behalf of the project.