The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Concerts: Building a FAIR Data Corpus for Musicology

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s Concert is an annual, live-broadcast New Year’s Day staple for a vast international audience, with an alternating line-up of star conductors and an ever-changing repertoire that incorporates the same favourites – most notably, the Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March – year after year. We are gathering, digitizing, and aligning the concert recordings of this series with audio features, score encodings, records of historical discourse, and other ephemera, interconnecting this multimodal music information and making it available as a digital corpus of linked open data following the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) research data management. Here, we raise musicological research questions motivating our work; describe the approach to assembling our corpus and developing associated editorial and analytical tooling, building on and extending recently established semantic music information workflows; and, provide insight into ongoing digital musicology research incorporating this data. Our work is motivated both by the pursuit of our own research interests in musicology and performance science, but also by a desire to provide a useful and reusable dataset for the wider digital music research community, bringing publication practices between these fields into further dialogue.