Candidates for the MEI Elections are invited to send along a brief CV and Candidate Statement. These are provided below, ordered alphabetically by surname.
Born in 1983 Benjamin finished his studies in musicology in 2008 with his M.A. thesis on “Combinatorics as a method of composition. Studies on Francesco Saverio Geminiani’s ›Guida Armonica o Dizionario Armonico‹“, including a digital edition of the treatise. His affiliation with MEI started with his work at the Edirom project at Detmold in 2009 and has continued in several other research contexts. After beginning as an editor at the Bernd Alois Zimmermann-Gesamtausgabe in 2016, Benjamin today is the project’s research software engineer. The insights gained as an editor help him identify community and user needs for his tool development, e.g. the oXygen-MEI-addon.
MEI has been a central aspect of my day-to-day work since the beginning of my professional career. Seeing it implemented as the backbone of the Edirom software was only the first step of a worthwhile engagement with both the format and the emerging community. I was fascinated by the fact that working with MEI meant working with music professionals worldwide. Seeing all the effort done to bring together such things as critical editions, diverse historical notations, or music analysis in a single format on the sole basis of shared interest was the spirit that fuelled my commitment to MEI.
As Board member, I would love to care for preserving and spreading this spirit by promoting open communication standards to foster a high rate of community involvement. Although these general issues might not promote new features in MEI’s encoding guidelines, I see them as the central aspect of MEI’s success.
Moreover, I envision more frequent stable releases of the MEI schemata and guidelines and would love to foster this through my engagement as Technical Co-Chair in improving and automating the build and release processes of the MEI schemata and guidelines.
I am a postdoctoral research fellow for the ECHOES project at NOVA University of Lisbon, where I lead the development of digital tools to support search and analysis of chants encoded in MEI. With a PhD and Master’s in Music Technology from McGill University and a Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, my academic journey bridges technology, music, and cultural preservation.
At McGill’s Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries (DDMAL) Lab, I contributed to the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) Research Project, directed by Ichiro Fujinaga, which focuses on developing computational methods for recognizing music symbols in digital images of music documents.
In my independent research, I have specialized in the preservation and encoding of mensural music. I developed the Automatic Scoring-up Tool for mensural notation, later integrating it into the Measuring Polyphony Editor. My PhD dissertation focused on digitizing and encoding a Guatemalan polyphonic choirbook from the colonial period, using optical music recognition, automatic scoring up, and computational error detection techniques to preserve this valuable repertoire.
I previously served on the MEI Board, where I focused on advocating for early music notations, specifically mensural and neume notations. Since then, I have taught workshops on early music encoding, including sessions on mensural notation at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference (2023) alongside Anna Plaksin, and neume notation at the same conference (2024) with Elsa De Luca.
If elected to the Board, I aim to expand MEI’s presence in Latin America by building on my collaborations with Digital Humanities organizations in the region, particularly through connections facilitated by Gimena del Rio Riande. Over the past two years, I have led Spanish-language MEI workshops in Latin America, including online sessions during Semana HD (2023 and 2024) and an in-person workshop at the TEI conference in Argentina (2024).
Additionally, I am honored to deliver the closing keynote for the first Latin American Music Information Retrieval (LAMIR) workshop. These recent developments have prepared me to help expand the MEI community in Latin America, fostering its integration within the broader digital humanities landscape.
Anna E. Kijas is the Assistant Director of Digital Scholarship and Lilly Music Library at Tufts University. Her academic training includes master’s degrees in library and information science from Simmons College, music with a concentration in musicology from Tufts University, as well as a bachelor of arts in music literature and performance from Northeastern University. In 2022, Anna co-founded Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, an initiative focused on safeguarding and preserving the digital cultural heritage of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Through musicology and libraries she became involved with digital humanities, exploring and pursuing ways in which computational methods and tools can augment scholarship and publishing. Anna’s interests are centered in pedagogical approaches and application of digital humanities tools and methods in historical research, and in the use of standards, including TEI and MEI, for open access research and publishing. She is also interested in supporting sustainable ways of developing digital projects through the use of minimal computing. Since 2018, Anna has been leading an open-access music incipit encoding project, Rebalancing the Music Canon that focuses on making works by historically un(der)-represented people more discoverable, decentering the musical canon, and making data-driven music scholarship more diverse and inclusive. More info at https://annakijas.com/.
I have been actively contributing to and participating in the MEI community for the past seven years, including serving as a co-chair of the Digital Pedagogy Interest Group (2020-2023), Administrative Chair of the MEI Board (2022-2024), MEC host (2020), and a member of multiple MEC program committees. It would be an honor to be elected and serve on the MEI Board once more. I would bring a unique perspective based on my experiences as both a scholar and librarian who is interested in pushing the boundaries of musicology (and humanities, in general) not only through the application of computational methods, but also by considering issues around diversity, accessibility, and sustainability in the data we create or curate, the research we do, and the projects we develop. Through the MEI Board, I would advocate for an inclusive and praxis-focused approach to the ongoing development of MEI. I would continue to identify ways in which the MEI can support an inclusive and diverse membership, especially by fostering and supporting emerging or early-career scholars and students.
Following a BMus in Music Performance and MM in Music History, Joshua Neumann authored one of the first digital musicology PhD dissertations in the United States, focused on performing traditions in Italian Opera and supported by grants from the US Department of Education and the University of Florida. He recently completed a term as Executive Editor of The Opera Journal, and currently serves as co-chair of MEI’s Digital Pedagogy Interest Group. Joining the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz in 2021, his introduction to the MEI community came through the conversion of the Joseph Haydn Werke metadata into MEI. He is currently running a project focused on integrating vocal performance analysis with notation expression variant-inclusive MEI as a means of examining Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s long association with Die Winterreise in relationship to modern conceptions of the cycle.
My interest in serving on the MEI Board emanates from my belief in leveraging the power of digital spaces for enhanced democratization and access to scholarship, especially documentation and preservation of musical creative practice and various kinds of musical documents from diverse populations. MEI rightly situates itself as the world leading standard for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures and is primed for adaptation for use with additional musical traditions, both notated and aural/oral. Currently serving as co-chair of the Digital Pedagogy IG has impressed upon me the need for being proactive about expanding within the community, and developing strategic partnerships is a natural possibility. One example is the development of a partnered-driven pilot project to introduce MEI as cultural preservation and interdisciplinary education in American secondary schools. Pursuing opportunities to expand the community and how the technological development both contribute to MEI’s sustainability and usability as a means of democratizing music scholarship, cultural preservation, and access thereto.
I received my diploma in astrophysics from the Technical University of Berlin in 2007 with a thesis on solar winds. I completed my studies in musicology and Protestant theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012 with a dissertation on the sacred works of Otto Nicolai at the Technical University of Berlin. After my doctorate, I worked at the Bach Archive Leipzig from 2011 to 2020, where I was responsible for the structural and technical development of Bach digital. For the last four years I have been working as a music engraving technologist at Enote GmbH in Berlin and lead the internal Verovio development group. Within the MEI community, I am a permanent member of the MEI technical team and several interest groups. My academic involvement also includes the position of co-convener of the Digital Musicology section of the German Musicological Society (GfM).
I am honoured to have been nominated again as a candidate for the upcoming election of the MEI Board of Directors. It is a privilege to serve as part of this great community. I would very much like to continue my work on the Board and contribute my expertise in any way I can. In particular, I would like to continue to support the development of Verovio, SibMEI, MuseScore and other tools that build on MEI to meet the diverse needs of community members.
Kristina Richts-Matthaei works as a digital humanist at the interface between library and information science and (digital) musicology. She has been in contact with MEI for many years and has been primarily involved in the metadata area and its further development. She was spokesperson for the MEI Metadata Group for many years. Since January 2024, she has been head of the Centre for Digital Music Documentation (CDMD) at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, where she is responsible for all digital aspects of long-term musicological projects in the Academy’s program (data standards, data curation, long-term archiving, documentation of data processes, project consulting, etc.) as well as the development of a specialist contact point for the conception, coordination and further development of digital work catalogs in music and digital transformation processes for musicological metadata as a whole. In addition, she is currently leading a DFG project to further develop the MerMEId metadata editor and is MerMEId Community Manager.
My general interest in MEI is to help to develop it into a data format that complies with FAIR & CARE principles and that can be used in all parts of the world for recording musicological phenomena. The MEI community has always proved to be a very friendly and open-minded community, and this should remain so in these difficult times.
As my focus is mainly on metadata, I would like to work towards being a neutral international point of contact for digital catalogs of works based on the MEI standard, from conceptualization to digital implementation. This will still require a lot of community-based coordination in order to bring together the various approaches in the best possible way and to integrate additional recording options that have not yet been considered, such as the recording of audio metadata. In this context, it is also important to enhance the ways MEI interacts with Linked Open Data, thus enriching interoperability of MEI with other standards.