OPEN Edirom is a model project carried out at the KreativInstitut.OWL in cooperation with the Centre for Music - Edition - Media (ZenMEM) and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. A stable and reusable workflow for open data publication and presentation of complex music-philological data is being developed and tested. As a proof of concept, the project draws on a particularly rich and intricate set of materials from 19th-century theatrical music—specifically, incidental music for spoken drama: the music for Goethe’s Faust in the adaptation by Carl Seydelmann, with compositions by Peter Joseph von Lindpaintner, premiered at the Stuttgart Court Theatre in March 1832. The dataset comprises a critical edition of 20 extensive incidental music works, some of symphonic scale (approx. 1,500 measures, 350 pages of score), as well as a critical edition of the corresponding text adaptation (3,047 poetic lines), including a comprehensive text-critical commentary (~2,000 critical notes), detailed metadata (especially source descriptions), and a complete set of images of the historical sources. These images are annotated in a finely granulated way, linking the visual material with both the musical and textual content, enabling flexible synchronic navigation of the material—particularly across multiple sources.

The overarching aim of OPEN Edirom is to transfer digital edition technologies into music-cultural practice, in line with the broader goals of the KreativInstitut.OWL. This includes facilitating performances based on digital materials and technologies for encoding and presentation. The project seeks to redefine the interface between musicological editions and musical practice, testing new models for the distribution and utilization of digital editions. At the same time, the project contributes to establishing essential data-processing components within editorial workflows for music. Since such components have historically been limited to prototype status—often due to project-specific constraints—OPEN Edirom seeks to implement stable and reusable workflows and technologies. The goal is to publish a clean, interoperable dataset that supports broad reuse in both academic and practical contexts. By working through this concrete editorial example, the project also aims to identify and address structural challenges inherent in the dual goals of critical music editions and performance-ready scores, along with their associated data processing needs.

Project duration: July 2023 to August 2024