Summer School 2021

CRIM Summer School 2021


Join by Zoom

See July 12 email from Freedman for Zoom information

Participant List

View list of participants here.

Slide Presentations for CRIM Summer School


Recordings of Individual Sessions


All sessions run from 9:00–10:30 AM (EST = New York Time), via Zoom (link via email to those who have registered)


  • Register here (you can attend as many sessions as you like). If you have already responded to this form, no need to do so again!

  • Everyone is welcome to attend, and you can of course invite friends, colleagues and students to sign up. There is no cost, of course.

  • The format of these sessions will be informal, interactive, and thematic. A tentative schedule of themes is set out below. No previous experience with CRIM, or with digital techniques for music encoding and analysis is presumed. But to prepare yourself for the sessions, it would be a good idea to take some time to review the introductory videos noted below.


About the School


Following shortly after the CRIM Workshop-Lecture with Daniel Russo-Batterham and Richard Freedman scheduled for July 7, 2021 (Session 27, which is 11:00-13:00 CET = Lisbon time) during the MedRen Music Conference in Lisbon, the CRIM Summer School will provide additional time for anyone interested in CRIM to learn more about:

  • From Score to Screen (MEI techniques, EMA, Verovio, and so on)

  • CRIM Analytic Vocabularies (discussing particular pieces or concepts)

  • CRIM Data Analysis Tools (Learning about the various scripts we're creating for pattern finding)

There will be short presentations by key members of the CRIM team (developers, editors, analysts), and also various interactive sessions in which participants will explore the music and the digital tools. No previous experience is necessary! Please let Richard Freedman (rfreedma at haverford dot edu) know if you would like us to focus on a particular composer, piece, or an aspect our vocabularies or methods. You could offer a short presentation, or serve as a 'model student' as you learn the tools and techniques.


Our Aims, In Brief


  • To explore the idea of musical borrowing and similarity from two disciplinary perspectives: musicology and data science.


  • To build communities of scholars, students, and musicians, and to create new kinds of collaborative research, teaching, and publication.


Getting Ready: Technical Matters


You will not need any special software for any of this, just a good internet connection, and a standard browser (Chrome or Firefox are probably best).


Part of the data analysis and visualization tools we’ll explore will involve using interactive Jupyter Notebooks, which have emerged in recent years as powerful and convenient ways for students and scholars to use computer code (Python, in this case). These run directly in your browser, and don’t require you to install any other software.


Note: that if you have a gmail account (free to sign up) you will also be able to use (and edit and save) Google Colab versions of these notebooks. But everyone will be able to see and use all of these tools on their own computer, as well as watch demonstrations during Zoom.


I will also invite you to join a Slack space for the CRIM Summer School. Slack is a free and useful tool for conversations among teams: you can ask questions, post links to pieces, even upload images of some score you’ve marked up. It’s a good way to collaborate, and we might want to use this space for questions, conversations, ideas that come up when we’re not actually meeting on Zoom.


You will not need a CRIM account in order to visit or explore the scores and analyses that are already part of the project. But I will create an account for each of you so that you can take part in the CRIM-hosted discussions of individual works (I will explain how these work), and so that once you are familiar with our methods, you’ll be able to add your own Observations and Relationships to the project.


Also Note: like everything else during the COVID crisis), updates to the CRIM data entry system (selecting notes, marking the musical types and other details) has gone slower than expected. We hope to have updates ready for CRIM Summer School, but it’s possible we will simply work with scores and discuss them. The CRIM Tech Team is working hard to make all this possible!


On the other hand, the tools for data analysis have developed far more quickly than anticipated, and we now see many ways for the machine to help us with the task of finding all kinds of patterns we already are interested in. The tools can already find recurring soggetti (of any length), find recurring harmonic patterns, locate dissonances, and tell us where fugas, PEns, and other presentation types are likely to be. The tools can work with just one piece, or with an entire corpus. Finally are beginning to map the data, both as it was observed by human analysts in CRIM, and now also with machine tools. All of this will continue to evolve. You will each be able to use and experiment with these tools.


Getting Ready: Musical Concepts


The following video presentations on YouTube will help you learn more about our work. Find them on this channel, or follow the links below.

Sample Marked Scores and Relationships


Focussed by Flexible Sessions: How You Can Contribute


Based on what you’ve each told me about your interests, I see that there is more interest in learning about and using the analytic vocabularies and exploring the digital tools we’re developing than in learning about MEI and related encoding techniques. We’ll certainly be ready to explain the latter, but we will try to spend as much time as possible with human and machine analysis of scores. We will remain flexible, and respond whenever possible to the questions that you would like to ask, or the concepts, pieces, and tools that you would like to learn about. In particular:


  • Would you like to lead discussion of some pages from a Model and Mass that interest you? We’ve added about a dozen new Masses and Models to the project in the last week, so there is much music to explore. Just a page or two from a given Model and Mass will certainly keep us occupied. We can do this as a complete group, or in Zoom ‘breakout’ sessions devoted to a particular composer or piece.


  • Would you like to comment on what you have found in the CRIM data and search engine? Something you agree with? Disagree with? (Note that there are many errors in the data, which is fairly typical for this kind of collaborative work!)


  • Would you like to be a kind of ‘test pilot’ during one of our sessions with the data analysis tools? Everyone will be able to use the Notebooks I mentioned above. But it would be good to have some of you who are ready to learn while we guide you and while others watch. We can all discuss the results, both from a musical and from a data analysis perspective)

  • Go here to tell us if you'd like to do any of these!


The School: Day by Day


July 14: Introduction and Key Concepts


  • Welcome and Orientation

  • Mutual Introductions (of the CRIM team, and of Summer School Participants)

  • Key Terms and Concepts (for digital scores, for analysis, and for data analysis)

  • Musical Types and Relationship Types (via a few selected examples)


July 15: Exploring the Music


  • Exploring the Music. Based on your suggestions, we will focus on a few works for close study. To date, the ‘favorites’ include (follow links to CRIM and PDF scores):


Févin's Missa Ave Maria, based on Josquin's motet.

Palestrina’s Missa Veni sponsa Christe, based on his own motet.

Guerrero’s Missa Sancta et immaculata virginitas, based on Morales’ motet

Guerrero’s Missa Super flumina Babylonis, based on Gombert’s motet

Manchicourt’s Quo abiit dilectus tuus, based on his own motet

Lasso’s Missa Ite rime dolenti (based on Rore’s madrigal)

Lasso’s Missa Susanne un jour, and Pere Riquet’s Missa Susanne un jour, based on Lasso’s (and Lupi’s) chanson

Sermisy’s Missa Tota pulchra es, based on his own motet

Phinot’s Missa Si bona suscepimus, based on Sermisy’s motet


  • We will select some key passages from these pieces for focused study, which can then take place for 30 minutes in various breakout rooms. Depending on your particular interest, you might want to print a very few pages from the model and Mass so you can mark them up yourselves.

  • Then we will return to the main Zoom session to share insights


July 21: Navigating the Notebooks for Data Analysis


  • MEI, Music21, and Pandas (and other Python libraries)

  • Data Structures

  • Notes and Intervals

  • nGrams: melodies and modules


July 22 Data Analysis, Continued


  • The Classifier: Predicting Presentation Types

  • Heat Maps

  • Similarity

  • Network Graphs


Beyond Summer 2021


Thanks to the ACLS Grant (which will run through June 2023) the work of CRIM will continue during the months ahead. We are planning:


  • To enrich the corpus (especially with works by Lasso and Palestrina)

  • To visit classrooms (both in person and via Zoom)

  • To meet for Study Days in Tours and Haverford (probably not until the Summer of 2022)

  • To compensate CRIM Student Assistants and Participating Scholars for editing, analyzing, and writing about the music, for conference papers, via the CRIM website, and in traditional modes of publication, too.