Paper held at the

The 14th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music

Queens University Belfast, July 1, 2010

PowerPoint Presentation available here:
Biennial Baroque Conference – Presentation Version 2

The goal of this project was to group manuscripts according to their handwriting similarity. I achieved this goal by linking the handwriting characteristics in the manuscripts to a feature tree that contained basic categories of handwriting characteristics. These categories were taken from Georg von Dadelsen’s “Beiträge zur Chronologie” a major publication in research on the handwriting of Bach and his copyists. By linking manuscripts and handwriting categories it was now possible to search for all manuscripts that contained a certain kind of handwriting characteristic.

A simple demonstration of this database is online at my harvard computer society server:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~roeder/

In 2003 – 2005, a similar approach to the problem was taken by the Rostock-based group eNote History in a research project that was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

I am currently working on a completely different approach that involves automatic recognition of handwriting characteristics with the help of neural nets. More info on this project can be found on the SCRIBE Project website at http://www.scribeproject.org.

The following is the proposal for my paper:

For the emergence of a public sphere for music in late eighteenth-century Berlin, hotels and restaurants played a crucial role. It was here that the first truly public concert series in the Prussian capital found a home. While previous music societies were meeting primarily in private homes, concert series such as Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s Concerts Spirituels and Johann Friedrich Carl Rellstab’s Konzert für Kenner und Liebhaber met in the music room of the luxurious Hotel Stadt Paris, which—until 1802—was Berlin’s sole formal concert venue. As my discussion demonstrates, the concerts that were hosted here were modeled closely after music events at court, both in terms of their exclusive and representational character as well as in terms of the audience behavior as it is described in contemporaneous sources. Yet at the same time the concert performances in the Hotel Stadt Paris were an expression of an emerging concert culture in which the choice and presentation of repertories reflected a growing need for audience education and cultivation. While the introductory comments in the program notes and the selection of rare and noteworthy works that were presented in the Hotel Stadt Paris were at first greeted enthusiastically by Berlin music lovers, the high profile venue and demanding music programs soon went out of fashion and were superseded by numerous concert events in less formal restaurants and coffee gardens. My paper focuses on the critical discussion that surrounded the concert events in the Hotel Stadt Paris and carves out the important role that this discourse had on the broadening of musical culture in late eighteenth-century Berlin.