Candidates for the MEI Elections are invited to send along a brief CV and Candidate Statement. These are provided below, ordered alphabetically by surname.
Margrethe Støkken Bue has a master’s degree in musicology from the University of Oslo, and specialised in critical sheet music editing, music philology and Norwegian music history. She worked for nine years with sheet music archive, editing and production at the Music information Centre in Norway. Bue now works at the National Library of Norway, where her work includes registering musical manuscripts, reviewing digital solutions for notated music, and editing and encoding digital publications of music related sources. She manages RISM and RILM in Norway, and is administrative co-chair of MEI Metadata and Cataloging Interest Group. Bue also serves as member of the program committee for the MEC2020.
My first meeting with MEI was through work with MerMEId and TEI. Seeking to develop my knowledge on digital musicology, I joined summer courses in Paderborn and Oxford. I found that MEI is a very important project that covers several aspects within digital musicology, and a project that needs to be kept going. Through interest and luck, I got the opportunity to work with MEI tutorials, guidelines and metadata, and I find this work very rewarding.
I am humbled by the nomination for the board, and being a board member would give me the chance to give more back to the MEI community. The board’s most important work is to facilitate the development of MEI in all areas, making sure that the project and community stays strong and relevant. To ensure future interest and engagement from old and new members, we need to keep today’s perfect combination of high technical and academic level with a welcoming and including environment.
By education, I am a musicologist, but after more than 15 years of work on the field of Digital Scholarly Editions, I think I’m better described as a Digital Humanist with a strong focus on music. I’ve been working with and on MEI for more than a decade now, and served on the MEI Board as Administrative Chair (2015-2018) and Technical Co-Chair (2019). From 2006 to 2012, I worked for the german Edirom-project, which developed generic tools for digital scholarly editions of music. 2012 to 2014, I worked for the Freischütz Digital project, which prepared the first encoding of a complete opera in MEI. Since 2014, I work as lead developer for Beethovens Werkstatt, a very ambitious project trying to explore the potentials of MEI for genetic editions of music.
Last year, the University of Paderborn allowed me to dedicate a significant part of my work time to MEI. Along with some other reasons, that led me to step back as Administrative Chair of the Board, and instead focus on assisting the technical development of both the MEI Schema and Guidelines. There is still a lot of work to do, and I would be honoured to continue serving the MEI Community from within the Board. For the next three years, my focus would be to re-align Schema and Guideline development, to make the process of MEI development more accessible and transparent to newcomers, to assist MEI Interest Groups in their work, and to improve the MEI experience for users through better documentation and presentation.
David Lewis is a researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre and a lecturer in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths University of London.
Since completing his training as a historical musicologist he has worked as a researcher on a range of digital musicology projects, which have included novel ways of publishing musical scholarship (e.g. the Lohengrin TimeMachine), corpus building (e.g. the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music), digital scholarly editions of music treatises (e.g. ‘Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works’) and works catalogues (‘Delius Catalogue of Works’, using MerMEId).
He has taught on both music and computing degree programmes, and helped design and deliver the Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. His two-volume study guide on database systems has been published by the University of London and is used for their undergraduate International Program.
David is co-convener of the MEI mensural notation special interest group, and is co-authoring a proposed MEI tablature module for lute and guitar music.
As MEI continues to strengthen its position as the most effective way of communicating music’s notational information, we are entering an exciting time for the format and the community. As the number and diversity of our user base increases, the need for clear and unambiguous guidelines and helpful examples becomes ever greater. At the same time, increasing specialised use will mean more modules and customisations, while the expectation for software support at all levels is increasing.
I aim to help this process,
After studying musicology and communication science at the Technische Universität Berlin, where I graduated in 2011 with a MA thesis on cantional settings in Heinrich Schütz’s Becker-Psalter, I worked for the edition project Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Sämtliche Briefe at the University of Leipzig between 2012 and 2015 (co-editor of vols. 9 & 12). Since October 2015 I have been a research associate of the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe at the University of Basel, where I am also writing my PhD thesis on music notation and code (submission end of 2019).
It is a great honor to be nominated to serve on the MEI Board. I have always experienced the MEI community as a welcoming, open-minded and inclusive family that is driven by the rich diversity of people involved and committed in it. Everyone, even the bloodiest beginner, can contribute a small but important part. That was the vision I was introduced to in my first MEI tutorial with Perry Roland (I guess, it was back then at the MEC in Montreal). Since then I have tried to give back some of the support and help I received from the community and to make MEI available to an even wider audience. By joining MEI‘s Twitter team (@MusicEncoding), by helping with the new tutorials website (https://music-encoding.org/resources/tutorials.html), or through workshops (together with David Weigl and others) on how to bring together MEI and Semantic Web technologies (MEC, Edirom Summer School, or other awesome spots). Within my modest means, I would be very happy to continue to contribute to the living of this vision and to support more people in their diverse needs, interest and involvement within the MEI community, but also in bridging with other communities.
Klaus holds degrees in physics (diploma) and musicology (PhD). He’s been singing for most of his life, spending much of that time in choirs. Several times he had sung and acted on stage, and even conducted here and there. He gives lectures in music history at the University of Music and Theatre and is a freelance programmer and consultant. Since 2011 Klaus works at the Leipzig Bach Archive and is involved in the development of Bach digital. He’s a member of the MEI technical team, the Metadata and Cataloging Interest Group, and deputy spokesman for the digital musicology section within the German Musicological Society.
I feel honoured to be nominated to serve as a member of the MEI Board. It’s a privilege to be part of this great community and my pleasure to work on and with MEI. I introduced MEI in Leipzig and I am continuously trying to encourage and help others in using it. Particularly interested in MEI and music engraving I invented MEILER (https://github.com/rettinghaus/MEILER) and take active part in the development of Verovio, SibMEI, and other tools build around MEI. Recently I put much effort into updating the MEI Guidelines. Being a board member, I hope to be able to pour even more love and time into MEI.
I hope that I need no introduction to most of the MEI community. But, for those who may have joined in the last couple of years, during which I was absent, I will endeavor a modest one: I am the originator of MEI and have worked closely with others to improve it and disseminate it to a larger community for a number of years. It has always been my goal to make MEI – the model and the community – as comprehensive and inclusive as it can possibly be. I am pleased that so many others also see the benefits of MEI’s free, flexible, and extensible model, and give of their time to participate in its continued development and wide-spread adoption. It has always been, and I’m sure it will continue to be, my pleasure to work with and for the MEI community.
My qualifications:
Martha Thomae is a PhD candidate in Music Technology at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University. She has a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and a Master’s in Music Technology from McGill University (2017). Since 2015, she has been a member of the Single Interface for Music Score Search and Analysis (SIMSSA) project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) at McGill, serving as student coordinator of the Music Information Research axis of CIRMMT since Fall 2017.
The main focus of her research is on the preservation and encoding of mensural music. She has developed tools to facilitate the encoding of this repertoire, including the Mensural MEI Translator and the Automatic Scoring-up Tool. She is an active member of the Mensural-MEI interest group. Currently, she is working on a project that involves the digitization and encoding of a set of Guatemalan choirbooks from the colonial period (copied in the XVIII and XIX centuries) which are written in mensural notation. She obtained an FRQSC grant in 2018, funding this project for the following four years.
Her research interests include early music, machine learning, and music information acquisition, preservation, and retrieval.
I am honoured to be nominated as a candidate for the MEI Board. I loved MEI since my first contact with it, during the beginning of my Master’s degree when I worked with Karen Desmond on the Measuring Polyphony Project. With MEI and related tools, we were able to encode late medieval motets in both modern notation and their (original) mensural notation. During this project, I learned about the advantages of MEI: encoding of different notation systems without losing information by transcribing them into modern notation, the flexibility to accommodate a wide variety of notation styles, and the community approach to its development. I have benefitted from using MEI and I would like for more people to have the opportunity to benefit from it as well. It will be my pleasure to serve the MEI community as part of the board.