Software Enhancements for the Digital Edition of the Settings of Torquato Tasso's poetry, ca. 1570-1640

FAIN: HAA-287804-22

University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003-9242)
Emiliano Ricciardi (Project Director: January 2022 to present)

The enhancement of the digital editing platform that undergirds the Tasso in Music Project by incorporating additional accessibility features and analytical tools.

The Tasso in Music Project (www.tassomusic.org) is the first complete digital edition of the early modern settings of the poetry of Torquato Tasso, the most prominent literary figure of late 16th-century Italy. With funding from NEH Scholarly Editions ($260,000, 2016-19), the project has made available a repertoire of over 750 settings, most of which were previously unavailable in modern edition, addressing an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and performers. We now seek to enhance the digital framework to make the project accessible to an even broader audience and to encourage analytical studies. Specifically, we will expand the range of the editions’ formats, providing among others an option for Braille notation, creating one of the largest musical repositories accessible to the visually impaired. Additionally, given the analytical potential of the repertoire, with settings of the same poetry by multiple composers, we will build computational tools to analyze the interaction between musical and poetic prosody/syntax.