Forgotten Voices in Norwegian Musical Heritage - The Music Archive of the Future
The Grieg Research Centre at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design received funding from the Humanities Strategy at the University of Bergen.
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Pilot Project
The main goal of the project is to map and further develop digital infrastructure for archive-based music research, starting with local music collections. This involves transcribing and translating metadata and critical commentaries as part of the internationalization of research in Norwegian musical heritage.
Further goals are to investigate the interaction between music researchers and archives, with the aim of highlighting and discussing how the digitization of collections has changed the way source searches are conducted by researchers and how source material is prepared for research by the archives, especially for an international audience.
An associated goal is to use this knowledge as a background to test new forms of digital research dissemination of Norwegian musical heritage and to develop new, contemporary applications. This will also form the basis for further applications for infrastructure development for national and transnational music heritage research with European partners.
The core of the project is
to further develop and implement infrastructure for editing multilingual and annotated digital work catalogs prepared by the Grieg Research Centre (digital work catalogs of Edvard Grieg, Anne Marie Ørbeck) and the Norwegian Musical Heritage project (Fartein Valen, Geirr Tveitt), based on the merMEId system (Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data). MerMEId is an initiative coordinated by ViFE – Virtueller Forschungsverbund Edirom and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) for both the production of thematic catalogs of works and the organization of source- and work-related information during the preparation of scholarly editions of music. More about this can be found here: Introduction to the MerMEId demo server.
to create a pilot version of a digital composer portal linked to the Bergen International Festival's series 'Forgotten Voices' from Norwegian musical heritage, a collaborative project between the research at the Grieg Research Centre, local music collections at Bergen Public Library, and the Festival. In 2023, Anne Marie Ørbeck was the festival composer, and in 2024, Inger Bang Lund and Borghild Holmsen were presented in the festival program.
More about the project:
The project has been awarded NOK 457,800 from the Humanities Strategy at the University of Bergen and will run from September 2024 to September 2025.
During the project period, internal workshops with international specialists in digital editing will be conducted. Results will be presented through an international concluding conference. The program will be announced later on this page.
The project is led by Arnulf Mattes, Grieg Research Centre, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen, in collaboration with Daniel Øvrebø at the University Library, University of Bergen. During the project period, research assistant Ulrik Bjørnstad Haug has also been appointed.