Conference Agenda

Annotated performance scores make up a significant portion of conservatory library collections, yet they are rarely described in ways that reveal their pedagogical, historical, or research value. Although these materials contain evidence of teaching practices, violin-school traditions, and evolving interpretive approaches, they are often catalogued as ordinary copies, leaving their informational and archival significance difficult for performers and researchers to identify. This paper presents a library-centered study of forty annotated violin scores(romantic era) from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music library, with the goal of developing models for more intentional management of these holdings.

The study employs a structured documentation method that records different types of interpretations such as fingerings and bowing. These observations are used to assess weaknesses in existing cataloguing practices and to propose enhancements to descriptive metadata, including annotation indicators and controlled vocabularies for performance-related markings. Special attention is given to how these materials contribute to provenance documentation and to the potential for designating annotated scores as a unified archival subcollection within conservatory libraries.

The findings also guide practical decisions in collection management. For example, they help determine which annotated scores should be prioritized for digitization, how to capture both faint and heavily layered marginalia clearly, and how libraries might better support performers seeking materials with specific pedagogical or technical features.

By treating annotated violin scores as materials that warrant detailed description and thoughtful preservation, this paper offers librarians a practical model for integrating performance annotations into cataloguing policy, archival practice, and user-focused services.

Although the digitization of humanities materials in Japan has progressed through platforms like JapanSearch, archives specialized in music scores remain limited. As a result, these scores are often obscured within vast collections of "Japanese classical books." Retrieving these materials is challenging due to bibliographic inconsistencies and the polysemy of the keyword "Fu" (譜), which denotes musical scores but also refers to non-musical records such as genealogies. Additionally, complex SPARQL queries attempting to filter these specific materials frequently result in timeouts.
This research aims to enhance the findability and accessibility of resources by systematically extracting musical scores from insufficient metadata. The methodology combines broad data collection via SPARQL with precise filtering in a local Python environment. First, materials containing the term "Fu" were aggregated to ensure comprehensive coverage. This was followed by local filtering to eliminate noise and identify relevant items.
Analysis revealed that approximately 13% of the materials containing "Fu" were actual musical scores. By leveraging metadata beyond titles and labels, the study also successfully extracted "hidden scores"—materials lacking "Fu" in their titles. These items accounted for 1.2% of the results and would likely have been overlooked by simple keyword searches. Furthermore, this study identifies the instruments corresponding to musical scores based on metadata descriptions, thereby contributing to the further enrichment of metadata.

Raven Chacon is a Diné (Navajo) composer, musician, and artist. He received degrees in both fine arts from the University of New Mexico and in music composition from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2022, he became the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music.

For Raven Chacon, scores are attempts to go beyond the limits of classical notation systems. In the composer’s words, “the limits of that [classical] written system cannot relay the information of the complex keys and modes of the sung Native voice, nor the fluidity of time inherent in Indigenous musics.” In Chacon’s vision, “a graphic score can resist the history of Western notation.” In fact, many of Chacon’s written compositions are at the confluence between scores that facilitate performance, and visual artwork, which are presented as the work itself. Using lines, circles, arrows, and dots as musical notation, the composer offers freedom to the performer and enables paths of agency to be acknowledged and celebrated. By interpreting these scores, performers are invited “to better understand where they have been and where they are headed, and to consider all the sites of conflict they are placed between.”

From a cataloger’s perspective, classifying Chacon’s works can cause a bit of a conundrum, as many of them can be both scores and/or works of art. This presentation will analyze the compositional output of Raven Chacon and discuss various cataloging procedures and options that can be applied to make it discoverable in a bibliographic environment.