The Music Encoding Initiative: Facilitating Open Access for Musical Notation

Abstract

Since the early 2000’s, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) has brought together professionals from varying backgrounds seeking innovative methods to create and share western musical notation within an open-source digital environment. The ability to encode the finer intricacies of musical notation utilizing MEI schemas such as the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is described by the MEI Guidelines and its accompanying bylaws. This review highlights resources on the MEI website (https://music-encoding.org) and Humanities Commons platform (https://hcommons.org/groups/musicencoding-initiative/deposits/) that keep the community connected and serve as practical aids for individuals wishing to become involved. The Music Encoding Initiative welcomes anyone interested in working together to create and reproduce manuscripts and facsimiles of musical works. A portion of this review essay introduces a series of video tutorials and accompanying documentation created for graduate music students by Maristella Feustle, the Music Special Collections Music Librarian at the University of North Texas (UNT). Access to these tutorials and documentation via the MEI website and the Humanities Commons CORE repository is a focus of discussion, as these videos provide guidance to music professionals becoming more accustomed to working with the Music Encoding Initiative. A recent phenomenon also discussed here encompasses teaching MEI to graduate music students studying MEI throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. While this endeavor presents benefits and challenges, the concept of teaching music encoding to graduate music students using MEI may become more prevalent in music programs.