Songs of the Victorians

Abstract

The present review occupies itself with the project Songs of the Victorians, developed by Joanna Swafford, which intends to provide both an archive (of reduced size as of yet) of parlor and art sort settings of Victorian poems, and an analytical tool for the study of the relationship between music and poetry in this neglected repertoire. The project partly delivers on its objectives, namely through its hierarchical but intuitive interface and through the use of the Augmented Notes software (developed by Swafford herself) to provide synchronizations of the original scores with performances of the songs (some of them recorded specifically for the project). The main limitation to the project, however, comes from the fact that it contains only four examples of the repertoire, which makes large-scale comparisons and analysis difficult.

Keywords

• music history
• music analysis
• victorian era
• archive
• music score visualization