F. Wiering
Tablature is one of the most important historical forms of music notation. It was widely used
between about 1450 and 1800, principally for the lute. Tablature indicates by graphical
symbols the finger-placements necessary to perform the music, rather than the abstract
‘musical’ events that are recorded in common music notation (CMN). Tablature is quite
convenient for players, but very hard to deal with for by non-players.
The aim of ECOLM (Electronic Corpus Of Lute Music; www.ecolm.org) is to store and make
accessible to scholars, players and others, full-text encodings of lute tablature sources. A
simple flat-text format called TabCode is used to encode the ‘bare bones’ of the tablatures.
Graphics and sound can be generated from it. It has a number of limitations, in particular, the
inability to record editorial interventions and alternative readings from other sources. To
overcome these limitations, TabCode is being enhanced to TabXML.
This paper discusses several methodological issues in creating TabXML:
· design of the XML vocabulary;
· provisions for interchange with other formats, for transformation into CMN and for
music analysis;
· applicability of the text-critical vocabulary to other kinds of music notation
· integration of TabXML in TEI-encoded music treatises (published in TmiWeb;
www.euromusicology.org).
This research employs Vincenzo Galilei’s Fronimo as a case study. This music treatise
survives in two editions (1568, 1584) and associated manuscript materials. Among its music
examples are tablatures for one and two lutes, tablatures combined with CMN, and two
versions of one piece rendered as one tablature.
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