Elgar's Themes at the Music Encoding Conference 2025
The Elgar's Themes project was active throughout the Music Encoding Conference, held at City St. George's, University of London, between the 2nd and 6th June 2025.
Team members David Lewis and Kevin Page participated in the 'LinkedMusic' project pre-conference workshop, led by Prof. Ichiro Fujinada of McGill University, which explored technologies to connect and align digital music resources.
On Tuesday, Lewis and Page co-organised a half-day workshop on 'Annotating Music Scores: Representing and interacting with annotations using MEI and Verovio' attended by over 40 participants. Presented in collaboration with the 'Annote' and 'E-LAUTE' projects, alongside Laurent Pugin (RISM Digital Center) and David Weigl (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna), the workshop addressed annotations of musical scores, considering their role and structure, along with strategies for representing, encoding and visualising them. In particular, attendees were given a hands-on tutorial in the use of new annotation extensions to the 'Verovio' music notation engraving library, developed by team members, and illustrated by extracts from Elgar's 'The Music Makers' op.69, proposed and reduced to vocal score by the project's Frankie Perry. Attendees also brought their own examples to annotate, which they did through the 'mei-friend' tool. Score annotations are an essential technological component being developed for Elgar's Themes, so the workshop provided a valuable opportunity to trial the tools with members of the community and receive their (positive!) feedback.
Following a busy and stimulating main conference, for which Lewis served as local chair, the team finished off the week with in-person meetings of Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) Interest Groups. At the MEI Linked Data Interest Group, Lewis and Page proposed updates and additions to the MEI Guidelines to formalise the digital annotation approaches presented at the workshop earlier in the week. The MerMEId Interest Group brought together multiple projects using this MEI cataloguing tool, to discuss and agree future plans and approaches for development and sustainability within the community, and where Lewis and Page were joined by Imran Asif, the project's Research Software Engineer.