Description
What we know of the relationships between the surviving Scarlatti keyboard sources has changed little since Joel Sheveloff's 1970 dissertation. While new sources have come to light, placing them within their context has remained a monumental task. We are now approaching 3,300 eighteenth-century manuscript and printed witnesses, which makes traditional comprehensive analysis using stemmatic methods, as Sheveloff attempted, impractical.The Texting Scarlatti project has compared almost all surviving eighteenth-century sources, creating an unprecedented dataset of over 150,000 variants. Variants between the witnesses and a baseline control are recorded in a searchable format readable both by humans and by computers. This paper explores how computational phylogenetic analysis – successfully applied to manuscript traditions in literature and recently to musical sources by Windram et al. (2014; 2022) – can aid experts in their analysis of the witnesses.
Using computer-assisted methods originally developed to show the evolutionary relationships of species, we can now model the relationships between textual sources across the entire corpus. Besides reinforcing known connections, findings to date have revealed unexplored links between sources suggesting previously unknown routes of transmission. These methods are not a replacement for expert analysis, but ought to be part of the modern expert’s toolkit.
I will first outline the data collection process of the project; afterwards, the focus will be on some of the family relationships phylogenetic analysis has suggested. These are then considered, as Sheveloff put it, ‘in light of the sources’: through traditional analysis.
| Period | 24 Oct 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 16th FIMTE Symposium, Vera, Almería |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Vera, SpainShow on map |