About
About the Project
The texts of motets - a genre of polyphonic (multiple lines of music that sound simutaneously), polytextual (multiple texts declaimed simultaneously) music - are marked by complex intertextual relationships as texts and musics are recast, reused, and remixed into other songs. The Motet Text Database is an online reference tool to make the texts of thirteenth-century motets digitally accessible, searchable, and discoverable. The project models knowledge about medieval works by combining methods of historical musicology and processes of understanding ontologies of digital objects. This project has been made possible by the Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester.
Metadata Conceptualization
Put simply, metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Relationships between data and metadata is best expressed through the acronym WEMI: Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item. Work means the thing as a concept, which can be expressed in individual instances—Expressions. Manifestations are a particular version of the thing that is expressed. The Item narrows further in specificity: it is the thing that is held in a collection. The IFLA—International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions—uses the handy example of Bach’s Six Suites for unaccompanied cello to illustrate this point. The idea of these Six Suites is the Work in the WEMI structure. An expression of the suites could be Yo-Yo Ma’s 1983 recording. The manifestation of this expression is that recording released by CBS records on RPM from 1983. Finally, an Item example of this Manifestation is the particular physical copy of this disc, autographed by Ma and held in a library collection.
In the case of my research as a musicologist, I work with several kinds of data, including texts of songs, manuscripts, historical figures, secondary sources, and so on. I envision each type of data as a kind of container for other pieces of information. For example, a manuscript contains motets, motets contain multiple voices, each voice might contain a refrain or other musico-textual reference to another text or snippet of music entirely. Thus, data can simultaneously serve as both “basic data” and “meta data” in function. Motets provide a fascinating way to think through how data interweaves, repeats, reappears, and slips away as we try to grasp it.
The slippage between work, expression, manifestation, and instance becomes all the more complicated in medieval data cases. Motets - and many medieval "works" generally - threaten the foundation of the work concept and force us to accept that rarely is there a clear-cut division between these data conceptualizations. In the Motet Text Database, I elected to count each iteration of a motet, with changing voices and the potential for contrafacture, as separate instances, with expressions accessible through linked manuscript source data.
This project was born of my desire to simply search and compare manuscript transcriptions as I worked on my dissertation. Because I argue in my research that motets can tell us crucial details about the poets, composers, and listeners of thirteenth-century song, I found myself frequently checking and rechecking edited editions to make sense of the silent corrections often made by editors. While typically these silent emendations are reasonable and well-documented, I needed to be able to compare the “same” texts from different manuscripts at a glance. These transcriptions also form the crux of the issue of manifestation versus item. By nature of making a comparative version of motet texts, I must abandon the faithful representation of a single instance. But by using metadata, and the relationships I can establish through Omeka-S with the metadata, I combine the individual items in a way that can dynamically serve multiple approaches. By searching for a particular term, a researcher might come across a motet text divorced from its context, but through the scaffolding of metadata I have established, the researcher has a considerably greater amount of freedom in deciding where to go next.
How to Use the Motet Text Database
The Motet Text Database is designed for researchers wishing to access diplomatic transcriptions of motet texts in a searchable, metadata-rich format. It allows for different levels of categorization - by the component parts of motets organized by voice type (upper voice, tenor) and subparts (refrains), as well as manuscript witness information. Simultaneously, the Motet Text Database can serve as a starting point to undergraduates or interested general audiences who wish to discover more about the world of thirteenth-cetury motet texts. As the site grows, functionality that emphasizes discoverability and broader accessibility will be introduced.
Use the navigation tabs above to navigate to specific kinds of items: in Faceted Browse, sort by Motets, Manuscripts, and Voices (upper voices, tenors, and refrains). In "Explore," users can discover different themes that appear across motet texts. Click the "advanced search" option at the top of any page to perform Boolean search operations.
About the Robbins Library
The Rossell Hope Robbins Library is a non-circulating medieval studies library at the University of Rochester, with significant holdings in vernacular literatures, Arthurian studies, material culture, the medieval Mediterranean, medieval history, the history of science, art and stained glass, philosophy, theology, manuscript studies, the history of the book, witchcraft, critical theory, and medievalism. It also has a substantial collection of medieval manuscripts, early print and other rare and unique materials, and artist books.
About the Author
Eleanor Price is a PhD candidate at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Her dissertation project explores the generic and socio-political boundaries of the thirteenth-century French motet. She works as a Staff Editor at the Middle English Text Series (METS) and also at the Robbins Library, where she served as the Robbins Digital Fellow. Currently Eleanor holds the Elsa T. Johnson Fellowship in Musicology.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the support of Dr. Anna Siebach-Larsen, director of the Robbins Library, the expertise of the Digital Scholar team at the University of Rochester, especially Jeff Suszczynski, Blair Tinker, and Vini Romualdo, and metadata specialist Margaret Dull. The logo design is by Evelyn Brosius. I am also grateful to Honey Meconi, Richard Freedman, and Jessie Ann Owens for their thoughts and mentorship.