The Project
Viennese musician and teacher Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), the twentieth century's leading theorist of tonal music, produced a series of innovative studies and editions between 1903 and 1935, while exerting a powerful and sustained influence, directly and through his pupils, on the teaching of music from the 1930s onward in the USA, and since the 1970s in Europe and elsewhere.
Schenker left behind approximately 130,000 manuscript and typescript leaves comprising unpublished works, preparatory materials, and personal documents, preserved in two dedicated archives, numerous libraries, and private possession. Schenker Documents Online offers a scholarly edition of this material based on near-diplomatic transcriptions of the original texts, together with English translations, explanatory footnotes, summaries, and contextual material relating the texts to Schenker's personal development and that of his correspondents.
Schenker Documents Online (SDO) project aims to increase insight into the life and mind of Heinrich Schenker, and by so doing to foster a fuller understanding of his career, works, and the intellectual development that they represent. Moreover, this project can stimulate biographical, historical, and socio-cultural study of Schenker, his circle of pupils, friends, and associates.
The Project was funded by the following funding bodies: Arts & Humanities Research Council, Great Britain – grant to the University of Southampton and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, for the third phase of the Schenker Documents Online project, covering the diaries and related correspondence October 1925 to September 1930 (£675,000); Leverhulme Trust (UK) – grant to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (the previous name for the Department of Digital Humanities), King's College London for a custom-built web environment involving multi-component architecture (£121,000); Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF) (Austrian Government) – grant to the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Wien, for transcription, translation, and XML encoding of Schenker's diaries 1918–25 (€250,000); Music & Letters Trust (UK) – grant for purchase of high-definition TIFF scans of Schenker's diaries 1918–25 (£1,500), and a second grant for scans of the diaries 1930-35 (£1,500); Music Analysis Development Fund (UK) – grant for professional translation of certain items (£950); University of Cambridge Faculty of Music – seed money to launch project (£3,000), and a second grant for originating music-notational images and embedding within documents (£2,500).
The project active development was completed in 2014; however, content creation for the live site is ongoing.
Resources on CKAN
The Schenker Documents Online CKAN Dataset makes available the following resources:
- The set of primary content in TEI-XML format;
- The documentation files which provide useful information about various aspects of the edition;
- An Eatsml file in XML containing all the entity records from SDO's EATS instance exported in XML format；
- The profile files for selected entities (for persons, places, works, organisations, and journals).
