Announcement | 27. November 2024

3rd NFDI4Culture Music Award: Announcement of recipient

By Prof. Dr. Kathrin Kirsch and Dipl. Des. (FH) Sarah Pittroff, M. A.

In 2024, the NFDI4Culture Music Award will be presented for the third time to honour projects or undertakings that make a special contribution to the goals of the consortium's areas of activity in the field of music and musicology. This year Dennis Ried (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) is honoured for his project "Baumann Digital".

The jury, consisting of representatives from NFDI4Culture, the Society for Music Research (GfM) and the Centre for Music – Edition – Media (ZenMEM), shortlisted the best projects from the submissions received. The award is associated with project funds of up to €3,000, which can be used to finance billable expenses that contribute to the objectives of NFDI4Culture, such as travel expenses, publication costs or expenses for organising project-related workshops. Kathrin Kirsch, community representative of musicology in NFDI4Culture, states that »the applications for the NFDI4Culture Music Award have once again made it clear how wide the range of subject and methodological areas of digital music and music culture-related research is. They also show how many outstanding ideas and excellent approaches there are in the community to creatively and productively close infrastructural gaps. NFDI4Culture is and remains irreplaceable for visualising, promoting and bundling these initiatives.«

Statement of the Jury

This year, the jury has decided to present the NFDI4Culture Music Award 2024 to Dr Dennis Ried (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) On the occasion of the ‘rediscovery’ of (Carl) Ludwig Baumann's manuscripts, a generic MEI-based catalogue raisonné of Baumann's works was created in the course of or as a follow-up to several qualification theses involved. This was followed by intensive research into Baumann's oeuvre and its digital cataloguing as part of Dennis Ried's dissertation. In structural terms, the project is a typical example of digital research in the humanities, which is often pursued for specific interests but is not always embedded in large-scale projects or superordinate infrastructures in such a way as to enable sustainable operation and low-threshold reuse. Nevertheless, the developed tool has already been used a second time, namely for the Joachim Raff Archive (Lachen/SZ, Switzerland), thus demonstrating that the customisation of such a tool is possible and feasible. 
While the source code is already freely available, it is difficult to adapt and reuse it for other issues because – as is common in many projects due to a lack of resources – systematic documentation is not usually eligible for funding in the narrower sense. The project would like to develop such documentation using this example as an example by specifically commissioning someone other than the person who created the code to do so in order to deal with ambiguities in the process at the same time.