Tools and Perspectives for a Digital Critical Edition of Fourteenth-Century Polyphonic Music

The ERC funded project European Ars Nova aims to study the corpus of poetry in Latin, Italian and French set to music by the polyphonists of the so-called Ars Nova. Since one of the main research goals of the project is the comparative study of musical and poetic texts, we are currently developing a web application that will allow readers to visualize and interact with the TEI- and MEI-encoded editions of our corpus together. The adoption of MEI as the underlying format for the digital editions of the musical texts presented us with the challenge of designing an editing workflow that allowed us to critically edit the texts in a user-friendly software like Finale. In this article, we illustrate how the critical editions are transposed to MEI documents using an ad hoc tool developed within the project, and how they are visualized in the web application. Finally, we discuss the critical aspects of the workflow and possible next steps for our digital critical edition in relation to the state of the art of music encoding.