Francophone Music Criticism, 1789-1914

Project start date: 2006-11

Project end date: 2008-10

The Francophone Music Criticism website gives access to the Francophone music press in all its forms (the specialist music press, theatrical press and daily newspapers). This cumulative resource currently offers over 1000 reviews and critical essays totalling 2.5 million words from the period 1789 to 1914. Texts are grouped in collections of the work of individual critics, and dossiers de presse of particular works or events. The material is fully text-searchable, and the entire corpus can be browsed by any combination of date, title, author, subject or journal, in addition to free-text searching. ‘Francophone Music Criticism’ is open access, without registration or password, and conforms to WCAG 2.0 standards. As of May 2010 the website contains 12 collections: Blaze de Bury, D’Ortigue, Saint-Saëns and Dukas as critics; Guillaume Tell, Les Huguenots, La Navarraise, Cavalleria rusticana, the Paris Tannhäuser; seven Gevaert operas; the Paris Meyerbeer Centenary, the Société Nationale de Musique. Collections on Benvenuto Cellini and Carmen will be added by the end of 2010. The site’s Resources page contains bibliographical materials and work in progress, to which scholars are actively encouraged to contribute updates. ‘Francophone Music Criticism’ is the result of the work of a network of around 70 international scholars led by Mark Everist (Southampton) and Katharine Ellis (Royal Holloway). The website is hosted by the Institute of Musical Research and the University of Southampton. It relies on contributions from a growing number of scholars who join the Network and oversee the preparation of materials for the site. The Network also runs an email discussion list and holds regular colloquia. Generation of pdfs from typed Word files supplemented by OCR where possible. Files are mounted onto the School of Advanced Study's 'SAS-Space', a standard digital repository using D-Space (soon to move to Eprints), linked to a bespoke search engine created at the University of Southampton which overlays it with database functionality.