Candidates for the MEI Elections are invited to send along a brief CV and Candidate Statement. These are provided below, ordered alphabetically by surname.
Maristella Feustle is the Music Special Collections Librarian at the University of North Texas. She also holds degrees in music theory and in jazz guitar. Her interests in music and archival practice include seeking new avenues for the preservation and accessibility of the over 175 collections in the UNT Music Library. Since 2020, she has led a project to encode early editions of Jean-Baptiste Lully operas in the library’s collection using MEI.
Creating training materials for the Lully project was the catalyst for her involvement in the MEI Pedagogy Interest Group, and she has led or co-led workshops on MEI basics at the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Music Encoding Conferences. Her home institution, the UNT Music Library, is pleased to welcome the Music Encoding Conference to UNT in 2024.
Outside of MEI, she has published multiple articles and book chapters, and has presented in the U.S., Canada, Poland, Hungary, and Germany.
My experiences with MEI and with the community of MEI users provide consistent motivation to spread the word about MEI and encourage its use as widely as possible. MEI’s cost-effectiveness, open lines of communication, and range of uses for research, description, analysis, and discoverability of information offer a compelling set of features to support and open new avenues of music scholarship. All of these attributes resonate with core values of librarianship, in which we strive to connect users with the information, skills, and tools they need.
Therefore, it would be an honor to serve on the MEI Board. In addition to assisting the Board in its current and future priorities, I will advocate for assessing and lowering obstacles to implementation.
I am a researcher at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre and a lecturer in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths University of London. I trained as a historical musicologist. Since then, I have worked as a researcher on a range of digital musicology projects, looking at novel ways to publish scholarship (e.g. the Lohengrin TimeMachine), to build and expand music and theory editions (e.g. the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music and ‘Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works’) and on works catalogues (‘Delius Catalogue of Works’, using MerMEId).
I have taught on music and computing degree programmes, and helped design and deliver the Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. At Goldsmiths, I teach web development and databases, and will introduce a module on the Digital Humanities in the next academic year. I am currently a co-chair of the MEI tablature interest group.
MEI – as a format, a data model and a community – has become a cornerstone of academic digital music practice, and I rely on it for the vast majority of my work. I have explored its use, first as an outsider and then as a user and contributor for almost twenty years. I am honoured to be nominated and hope to continue supporting our work strengthening our documentation and guidelines, and expanding our reach – to musicologists, musicians or developers.
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 finished my PhD thesis on music notation and code by the end of 2019.
It is a great honour to be nominated again for the MEI Board. I have always found the MEI community to be a welcoming, open-minded and inclusive community, characterized by the rich experience, expertise and diversity of the people involved in it. As a member of the Board and Technical Team for the past three years, I have been delighted to contribute to this living vision and to support more people in their diverse needs, interest and commitment within the MEI community, and I would be happy to continue to advocate for this.
I completed my dissertation at Geneva University on optical music recognition and was then Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University. Since 2009, I am Co-Director of the RISM Digital Center in Bern, and secretary of the Board of Directors of the RISM since 2013. I am also a Co-PI for the LinkedMusic research project based at McGill. In 2019, I completed a Habilitation (privat docent) in Musicology and Digital Humanities at the University of Bern where I continue to teach regularly.
I would feel honored to extend my role on the MEI Board. My involvement in developing the Verovio library, the implementation of MEI support in MuseScore, and my duties in the RISM project has provided me with valuable perspectives on the evolution of MEI tools. I believe these insights can greatly benefit the entire MEI community. I am committed to dedicating time to this endeavor, a commitment I’ve maintained for numerous years, made possible through the ongoing support from my institution, the RISM Digital Center in Bern.
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As its originator and first evangelist, I have extensive knowledge of all technical and non-technical aspects of MEI. Alone at first and later with others, I have guided MEI development, including creation of the MEI Board, from its inception to the present. One of the original goals of MEI was to create not just a file format for music notation data, but a collegial, self-governing community that would continue my original efforts. In my opinion, this is what sets MEI apart from other attempts to create music notation data formats, and I believe it has been very successful. It has been my pleasure to participate in the MEI community and I look forward to serving on the Board again.
Vivian Teresa Tompkins is a PhD student in the Musicology program at Northwestern University. She also holds an MSt in Music (Musicology) from the University of Oxford (2018), and an MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University (2021). MEI plays a key role in her musicological research, which focuses on women’s music-making in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, particularly their performance of devotional music in domestic contexts. As part of this research, she is creating a digital edition of the devotional song collection Harmonia Sacra (1688; 1693), which contains music, poetry, and artwork by both canonical and lesser-known composers, writers, and artists. More broadly, she is interested in the digital representation of printed song books from early modern England, and in the ways that digital editions can support engagement with music that was designed for use in non-professional (or “amateur”) settings. In addition to her musicological research, she maintains an active interest in music librarianship, and currently serves as co-chair of Music Library Students and Emerging Professionals (MLStEP), an interest group of the Music Library Association.
In 2018, while applying for graduate library programs, I came across Anna Kijas’s keynote speech from the Music Encoding Conference. I did not know much about encoding, but I was challenged and intrigued by the questions about canonicity, colonization, and recovery that Kijas raised. These questions spoke to my research on domestic music-making in early modern England, and I wondered how encoding might make this music more accessible for different audiences. I continued learning about MEI, and eventually started to work on a digital edition of my own. In 2021, I took part virtually in my first MEC; this year, I was able to attend the joint MEC-TEI Conference in Paderborn.
I am honored to be nominated for the MEI Board. If elected, I will contribute my perspective as a graduate student user of MEI. I will build on the important work the Board has already started in terms of reaching out to students who are interested in learning more about MEI. As a part of this effort, I also hope to further the use of MEI and MEI-based projects in the classroom, as well as in digital projects that focus on marginalized individuals, communities, and repertoires.