Conference Agenda

The announcement in August 2024 that Finale—the industry-standard notation software for over three decades—would cease development immediately, signaled a paradigm shift for the preservation of born-digital music. This paper presents findings from a comparative study of Greek art music composers, analyzing data from two distinct survey periods: pre-discontinuation 2019 (n=41) and post-discontinuation 2025 (n=51). By employing a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative usage metrics with qualitative assessment of archival practices, we quantify the systemic risks of "digital oblivion" facing contemporary cultural heritage.

Our research reveals a digitally mature community where the use of notation software has reached saturation stability: approximately 78% of composers employ digital scores as their principal compositional tool, a figure virtually unchanged since 2019. However, this high adoption rate masks a severe preservation crisis: for composers relying on Finale, over 90% of their total creative output is stored exclusively in proprietary Finale format. Alarmingly, for half of these respondents (median), 100% of their life’s work is locked in this now-obsolete ecosystem.Despite this, awareness of "vendor lock-in" remains low. Only 37% recognize this dependency as a significant threat, and resistance involves high friction: ~40% of active Finale users have no plans to migrate.

We argue that the "Finale crisis" warns of the obsolescence threatening born-digital archives. Dependence on proprietary ecosystems poses a systemic risk. The paper proposes that music libraries must evolve from passive collectors to active preservation hubs, advocating for software-agnostic literacy and mandating open standards to prevent inaccessible scores.

Round Table

IMS Study Group “Music of the Christian East and Orient” and Study Group "Psaltike" of the Levi Foundation in Venice

This Round Table will investigate the manuscript world of Eastern Christian Chant in its various traditions (Byzantine, Slavonic, Romanian, Armenian a.o.), looking gratefully back at what has been accomplished in creating the basic instrumenta studiorum (manuscript inventories, catalogues, and databases of different types) and reflecting on developmental lines for the years to come.

More precisely, we will refer a. to the existent catalogues, with emphasis on the publications since 2000, analyzing the different approaches in the cataloguing work, b. to various attempts of numbering the pieces of the old Byzantine repertories (e.g the numbering of the stichera according to the Standard Abridged Version a.o.), c. to digitalized chant-manuscripts collections, d. to projects of searching sources and their metadata, e. to ongoing/future projects connected to chant manuscripts in the context of digital humanities.

The Round Table will also explore possibilities for greater interconnection between the codicological and paleographical study of eastern Christian chant and historically informed performance practices and music education in the contemporary world. To this end, some recent works will be mentioned, along with a reference to ongoing projects on the subject, such as the Encoding of eastern neumatic notations (MEI initiative), the revival of old performance practices through multidisciplinary research, along with their benefits for music education.

tbc