Medieval Music on the Web

Abstract

In 1994 La Trobe University Library at Bundoora, Victoria mounted a database of medieval music on the Web. In its earliest version, this contained bibliographical information about every piece if music known to have been composed in the fourteenth century: some 3,198 works contained in 427 manuscripts by 150 composers. In 1996, a complete cycle of Gregorian chant from fourteenth-century sources was added to this, with transcriptions of the music into modern notation and links to colour images of original manuscripts. This latter database is searchable by melody as well as by text. This site now attracts 100,000 hits per month; and with the closure of the music department at La Trobe University, the database is being moved to a new site, its search engine revised and its scope expanded. This paper will be presented by the two authors of the database and will discuss aspects of its development and its transition to a new site.