The article “The monumental edition in the digital age: creating a sustainable future” was recently published in the Journal of New Music Research (Routledge), a high- impact musicology journal. Jointly written by ten scholars, it was the result of an EarlyMuse meeting, and particularly of its ‘Publications’ Working Group. The purpose of the article, and of the meeting that inspired it, was to assess and reflect on the present state and future perspectives of the so-called Monumenta music collections in Europe. Born within the context of nineteenth-century historicism and the political and ideological nationalistic background shaping that century, these collections were created with the objective of documenting the “musical monuments” of a given country. More than a century later, in a totally different historical context and with the emergence of digital methods applied to scholarly editions, the time is right to critically reflect on the place of this type of music collection.
Together with a broad introduction, final conclusions, and additional data as an appendix, the article contains five short essays written by scholars and editors of some of the most emblematic European Monumenta collections: ‘Monumentos de la Música Española’, ‘Musica Britannica’, ‘Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae’, ‘Monumenta artis musicae Sloveniae’, and ‘Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich’. The article provides an overview of the current plans and projects of these specific collections, and how they respond to different challenges and opportunities. These include the specific set of skills that music editors need, the need for increased academic recognition for critical music editions, ways to develop strategies to respond to the needs of today’s performers and adapt to the increasing demand for flexibility of music editions formats, and how to produce fully digital music editions while maintaining the usability of traditional printed formats. Of course, the article is not exhaustive in its scope, but it provides the necessary groundwork and reflections to prompt action in the field.
It is worth noting that the meeting that inspired this article was probably one of the few times in the history of monumental editions that editors-in-chief of these collections sat together and engaged in a joint reflection. This was possible thanks to the large pan European network of scholars created by the COST Action EarlyMuse, which provides the necessary funds and the appropriate intellectual milieu for tackling fundamental issues for Early Music in Europe and globally.
Andrea Puentes-Blanco