On 22 February Lewis Jones put out a short message on Tradsong to say that the 1905 edition of Sabine Baring-Gould’s Songs of the West had been published on the Project Gutenberg website – http://www.gutenberg.org/files/56625/56625-h/56625-h.htm. I have also heard from Linda Cantoni who is a member of the project team who prepared the book for online publication. I wanted to add to Lewis’s message because I believe that the way in which Project Gutenberg have implemented the digitisation of the book is a leap forward from similar exercises in the past.
The book appears as a mixture of newly prepared text and images of the original music. The first item that comes up after the title page are two indices, the first by its place in the book and the second alphabetical. Each index entry has a hyperlink to the song image and text. The indices are followed by Baring-Gould’s Preface and Introduction. In the latter you will find that, if a song is mentioned, the title is hyperlinked to the song.
Between the image of the music and the song text there are three links for each song. The first plays the music. I am pleased to discover that it is not just the melody that is played but the arrangement as well, though the melody is voiced in such a way that it can be heard plainly above the accompaniment. The second link is to the XML coding for the music and the third to Baring-Gould’s note on the song (The notes appear at the end of the book and have links to take you back to the song again).
This is a well thought-through piece of work that makes great use of digital technology to add value to the traditional book form. In the 1905 edition of Songs of the West the majority of the arrangements were by Cecil Sharp. Several of Henry Fleetwood Sheppard’s arrangements were retained from the earlier editions, as well as a few by Frederick Bussell. This gives us the opportunity, through the playback, to hear the approach of each of these three musicians – though a direct comparison of Sharp’s arrangements with those that Sheppard composed for the same song is not possible.
Well done to Project Gutenberg for this excellent piece of work. And thank you, Lewis, for drawing our attention to it.
Addition: Linda Cantoni wrote to me again after I posted this and I thought I would share her description of the process that they go through with you:
The ‘Songs of the West’ project was the brainchild of a Cornishman, Chris Curnow, who volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders, http://www.pgdp.net. He provided the image scans and OCR text. DP volunteers then proofread and formatted the text in several rounds “one page at a time” (part of our slogan). I’m one of a handful of music transcribers at DP who’s also qualified to “post-process” a project, i.e., finalize it by doing last checks, then creating the plaintext, HTML, and mobile e-book versions. So Chris asked me to take it on. I used Finale 25 and a midi keyboard to create the sound files. It took a couple of years to complete, but that was in part because “real life” got in the way at times and I had to take breaks.
We have produced some other large music projects, but because we don’t have a lot of volunteers who are capable of transcribing music, we haven’t done that many. You might be interested in the two volumes of D’Urfey’s Pills that we’ve done (Vol. 5 is at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26679, and Vol. 6 is at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33404) – even though the Rev. Baring-Gould thought D’Urfey’s work was, let us say, crass.
You mentioned the accompaniment. I have to say that I was absolutely delighted with the quality of the arrangements made by Baring-Gould’s co-authors. I’ve worked on quite a few 19th-Century books with songs, and all too often the accompaniment is unsatisfyingly simplistic or just not very good. These were a joy to transcribe.
And I thought that you might like to know about another small treasure on the Project Gutenberg website that I discovered while doing a search for Lucy Broadwood, for which Linda also did the music transcriptions. Have a look at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36308/36308-h/36308-h.htm