Popular musical arrangements in the nineteenth-century home: A study of The Harmonicon supported by digital tools

Musicologists often remove all traces of the scaffolding used to construct their scholarship at the point of completion -- presenting information about bibliographic and evidential sources, but not describing the tools and digital resources used. This makes an analysis of the state of digital support for musicology harder to achieve. In this paper, we consider both outcome and scaffolding, presenting a musicological study built upon digitised library resources, which made use of digital tools, and then considering the digital affordances that were required by the study.
We explore the musical content of the music periodicals, 'The Harmonicon' (1823-1833) and 'The Musical Library' (1834-1837), considering what it tells us about music making and reception in early nineteenth-century England. Journals such as these are important both for bringing a wide range of music into the home, but also for adapting music written for concert halls and the opera for the domestic sphere through musical arrangement. Since this music was more accessible to many than ticket prices, its selection and deployment in such volumes would have been critical for shaping an audiences musical tastes. At the same time, the editor was compelled to tailor the music to the abilities and interests of the audience, in an economically highly challenging environment.
This musicological study was supported by digital tools at multiple stages in the process. We describe the interaction between tools and scholarship, reflecting on where these were strong, but also considering opportunities for future development. We do this in terms of an iterative model of research, digitisation and editing, acknowledging that research must be able to continue despite imperfections and absences in tools, resources and digital data.