Texting Scarlatti: composition, reception, performance

Domenico Scarlatti was one of the leading figures of eighteenth-century music. He revolutionised keyboard playing, became a central point of reference for many generations of keyboard composers, and remains extremely popular with performers and audiences alike. But he is something of an enigma. He worked for nearly forty years in the courts of Portugal and Spain, yet we have very little hard evidence about his personal and professional life there—none of the autograph scores, sketches, notebooks, diaries and letters that would normally help to contextualise a composer’s music.

The ‘Texting Scarlatti’ project has therefore focused on the evidence we do have—the sonatas themselves—and has three main aims:

to achieve a better understanding of Scarlatti’s approach to composition and his contribution to European musical culture;
to map the circulation and reception of his music within and beyond Spain; and
to suggest how the results of this study can influence the programming and performance of his work in twenty-first century contexts.

At the heart of the project is a large corpus of manuscript and printed copies (‘witnesses’) of his 555 keyboard sonatas: 3290 copies in total. Understanding the relationships between these witnesses and mapping their major routes of circulation and implied chronologies requires detailed bar-by-bar, note-by-note collation. This process that cannot be automated and requires careful attention to detail and skilled judgement. Every note of music encodes many different kinds of information; a full collation of all 3290 witnesses will generate over 20 million data points; and, wherever possible, each collation has been carried out independently by two researchers and validated by a third.

To piece together this jigsaw the project has developed a new model for musicological research, combining traditional textual criticism, large-scale computerised data management, and a collaborative approach: the core team of four specialists has worked with a group of 35 volunteer ‘citizen scientists’ from around the world. This group brings extra pairs of hands for the textual heavy lifting and extra pairs of eyes for collation, data entry and double-checking. Most of the volunteers are professional performers and teachers who are well placed to act as ambassadors for the project. We are very grateful for their participation. We could not have done it without them.