Digital Humanities 2023 Hand in Hand: Strauss’ Kaiser Walzer as a case study of interdisciplinary collaboration in digital musicology VanderHart, Chanda vanderhart@mdw.ac.at mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria Nurmikko-Fuller, Terhi Terhi.Nurmikko-Fuller@anu.edu.au Australian National University Weigl, David M. weigl@mdw.ac.at mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria Abstract Johann Strauss II wrote Kaiser Walzer (Emperor Waltz), one of his most well-known and frequently discussed instrumental works in 1889. The work, composed on the occasion of Austrian Franz Joseph’s visit to Prussian Wilhelm II and one year after the Aus- trian emperor's jubilee, has long provoked the question: which of the two Emperors was the waltz for? Originally titled “Hand in Hand” by Simrock, Strauss’ publisher, ostensibly to flatter both emperors, it was first performed in Berlin on 21 October. (Rubey 1994) The original cover of the piano edition bore the illustration of the Austrian Imperial Crown. The work opens with a march, a Prussian nod, but includes three waltzes, a Viennese trademark. In this short presentation we engage with this question using novel digital musicology techniques. Specifically, we employ empiri- cal evidence in the form of performance recordings, audio feature data, score encodings, and collected scholarly discourse drawn from a multi-modal FAIR data corpus generated by the Signature Sound Vienna project (Weigl et al. 2022). Impassioned arguments for the waltz’ intended dedicatee have long been made on either side, citing evidence both historical and musical (Endler 1998; Rubey 1994; Ritter 1892; Suchet 2015). It was arranged by both Schoenberg in 1921 to wistfully look back to a bygone Austrian monarchy, and rebranded as part of Nazi propaganda to glorify unified Deutschtum with an added, openly jingoistic text for the third waltz. Musical elements perceived as (stereo)typically Prussian (i.e., “martial”: dotted rhythms, heavy downwards beats, percussive snare licks, downwards musical im- petus to which a person would march) and Viennese (i.e. “sen- timental” / “waltz-like”: rubato-filled melodic lines, lightness of sound, early second and late third beats in ¾ time to which a per- son would waltz) have been cited to support either side of the dis- cussion. Even the extra-musical cultural context is ambiguous and changes over time; films from The Last Emperor to three titled Emperor Waltz give the work varied implications (Lang 2014). Engaging with this rich background of scholarly discourse and socio-political context, we turn to an extensive collection of re- cordings spanning some 80 years of performances, adding a his- torically underutilised source of evidence to standard score ana- lysis (Cook 2013). Through close and distant listening, can we illuminate shifting perceptions of the waltz’s essential character, by both performers and audiences? Do the performances more sa- liently evoke, as John Suchet (2015) argues, “the character of Em- peror Franz Josef; a military man, but a quiet one,” or emphasise purportedly German values inherent in the composition’s form, as program notes from the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Con- certs in Anschluss times persistently claim; “a symphonic waltz ….intended for the German emperor” (Schneider 1939/1940). By interlinking score encodings with aligned performance recording collections we are examining broader interpretative changes over time. When comparing aspects (e.g. temporal profiles, dynamics, timbre, mastering) of recordings by the Vienna and Berlin Philhar- monics, one might assume that Berlin would adopt a more Prus- sian, militaristic style and Vienna highlight the carefree, waltz-like Schwung. However, comparing performances in the Vienna Phil- harmonic’s New Year’s Concerts in the 1950s and 1960s to those by either orchestra since the 1980s, there appears to be a notice- able diminishment of more martial musical elements over time. Our case study demonstrates the opportunities presented by interdisciplinary collaboration within the context of digital mu- sicology, adding new dimensions to musicological scholarship, mutually informing and benefiting from advancements in music informatics research. The corpus and tooling developed as part of Signature Sound Vienna facilitate close and distant listening, score analysis and annotation. To encourage and engage in digital scholarly communication, our findings are captured as Web An- notations (Sanderson et al. 2017) – Linked Data structures upon our digitised evidence materials. To explicitly identify and relate (sections of) different performances, each of which contribute in their own way to our assertions, we apply the Music Annotation Ontology (Lewis et al. 2022) to abstract away from annotating on the ‘surface’ of our digital artefacts (e.g., timed intervals of audio signals), instead targeting abstracted musical objects individually manifested within these different artefacts. This is the first appli- cation of this model to performance- rather than score-based mu- sic research. The approach exemplified by our case study enables disparate media to interconnect with scholarly discourse, providing musico- logists the means to discover, track, record and share research out- puts. We contribute to the ongoing debate about Strauss’ compo- sition by grounding our findings within an empirical framework, linking claims from historical reception documents to evidence within our digital corpus. The focus on FAIR data management enables the corpus and all connected research objects to be used as a jumping-off point for further investigations. Though presented in the context of classical music performance analysis, wider ap- plications to the arts and humanities are envisioned wherever ob- jects of interest are most appropriately understood in connection with their surrounding layers of discourse and analysis. Acknowledgements This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [P 34664-G]. For the purpose of open ac- cess, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this sub- mission. We gratefully acknowledge the collaboration of our col- leagues in the Signature Sound Vienna project: Werner Goebl, 1