Dear colleagues,

I am delighted to announce the second talk of the Digital Musicology Study Group at Harvard University. I hope that many of you will be able to attend. Please forward this invitation widely.

Studying Music Ficta & Early Renaissance Canons with the music21 Toolkit
(Michael S. Cuthbert)
November 22, 5pm, Davison Room in the Music Department, Harvard University

Although computers have transformed the way we listen to, compose, and acquire music, their usefulness in analyzing music has been limited by the lack of easy-to-use, general-purpose software frameworks.  The music21 project at MIT fills this gap with a flexible toolkit that allows researchers to write short scripts to solve both simple and extremely complex musicological problems. Cuthbert’s talk introduces the toolkit and shows its potential with specific examples and answers drawn from various genres of Renaissance music and beyond.

Michael Scott Cuthbert is Assistant Professor of Music at MIT. Cuthbert received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. He spent 2004-05 at the American Academy as a Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies and 2009-10 as Fellow at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. His teaching includes early music, music since 1900, and music theory. Cuthbert has worked extensively on computer-aided musical analysis, fourteenth-century music, and the music of the past forty years. He is creator and principal investigator of the music21 project. He has lectured and published on fragments and palimpsests of the late Middle Ages, set analysis of Sub-Saharan African Rhythm, Minimalism, and the music of John Zorn. Cuthbert is writing a book on Italian sacred music from the arrival of the Black Death to the end of the Great Schism.

About the Digital Musicology Study Group
The Digital Musicology Study Group at Harvard University aims to provide a forum for the rich community of music scholars who are working on aspects of the digital humanities in the Boston area and beyond. In monthly sessions, scholars present their work and discuss implications, applications and future developments of their research. The series is supported by the Dean for Arts and Humanities and is hosted by the Music Department, Barker Center and the FAS-IT group. All talks are free and open to the public.

For additional information please contact the organizers,

Matthias Röder, roeder@fas.harvard.edu and Alexander Parker, afparker@fas.harvard.edu

With best regards,
Matthias Röder, Harvard College Fellow