Moments Musicaux Towards Comprehensive Catalogues of Real Repertoire Examples for Teaching and Research Mark Gotham Cornell University Mark.Gotham@Cornell.edu ABSTRACT One form of musical library that is a mainstay of traditional mu- sicology and which stands to beneft from digital attention is the ‘anthology’. These collections, often paired with a textbook, are tasked with bringing together a set of ‘representative’ examples for musical devices such as particular chords. This paper provides lists of such examples, both manually cu- rated and automatically retrieved, bringing computational methods to complement and extend the traditional concept and prepara- tion of a musical anthology. The lists and code are available at https://github.com/MarkGotham/Moments. Discussion centres on the motivations for and issues with prepar- ing such lists, including the design of retrieval algorithms. A fnal section discusses the special case of examples for teaching musi- cianship which can face additional difculties in fnding suitable repertoire examples. Again, this culminates in datasets of repertoire examples, but for specifcations such as ‘diatonic, stepwise melodies in quarter and eight notes’. CCS CONCEPTS · Information systems → Digital libraries and archives; · Ap- plied computing → Digital libraries and archives; Sound and music computing; KEYWORDS Textbooks, anthologies, pedagogy, fundamentals, musicianship, cor- pus analysis, datasets, harmony, augmented chord, augmented sixth chord, Neapolitan sixth chord, mixed meter ACM Reference Format: Mark Gotham. 2019. Moments Musicaux: Towards Comprehensive Cat- alogues of Real Repertoire Examples for Teaching and Research. In 6th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM ’19), No- vember 9, 2019, The Hague, Netherlands. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3358664.3358676 1 INTRODUCTION We learn about music partly through sheer exposure to repertoire, and we teach music partly by guiding that repertoire exposure, giving names to musical devices we consider sufciently common Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. DLfM ’19, November 9, 2019, The Hague, Netherlands © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7239-8/19/11. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3358664.3358676 or signifcant to warrant a title, and honing a sense of ‘general’ versus ‘exceptional’ cases in diferent stylistic contexts. Textbooks and anthologies of examples seek to support this pro- cess and are often organised in relation to those named devices. They always provide helpful, illustrative examples from the reper- toire, but those examples are usually few in number (inevitably so in print publications) and without evidence in support of their alleged ‘representativeness’. Doubtless the authors draw on much wider repertoire experience, and instructors reinforce the examples with illustrative cases from contrasting genres and eras, but in the digi- tal age of automated retrieval and online publication, anthologies can do a better job of supporting this process with lists of greater length, diversity, and clarity of remit. These more extensive lists would help all instructors, but particularly new teachers preparing materials for the frst time, often from scratch and under intense time-pressure (let alone the other pressures such as job-insecurity). More extensive lists would also help formalise the feld and open such ‘representativeness’ to closer inspection. The feld of empirical musicology has blossomed in recent years with that kind of inspection as a key goal, but it has arguably developed faster than the public sharing of and reckoning with datasets. Computer-assisted retrieval methods make the goal of com- prehensive listings theoretically possible, and it is only the lack of a comparably comprehensive provision of publicly available, machine-readable scores that keeps this goal out of reach. Never- theless, in anticipation of such a dataset, we can of course work with those repertoires that are available, honing our methods in time for when the provision of corpora reaches scale. Additionally, while computational methods will be essential to the future of this feld, they may be considered complementary to the traditional, ‘manual’, preparation of lists for textbooks and anthologies. These are often the product of a lifetime’s experience not just with the repertoire, but also with what works in the class- room. As such, these selections of efective exemplars may defy the algorithmic approach, and should perhaps be collated in tandem with ś rather than completely replaced by ś new methods. This paper provides lists of examples substantially longer than comparable existing provisions. It also critically assesses the im- plications of the methods for gathering them (and shares the code for doing so where relevant). We begin with ‘meta-lists’: colla- tions of existing lists for the augmented sixth and Neapolitan sixth chords from music theory anthologies, where they invariably fea- ture (Section 2, Supplementary Tables 1 and 2). Complementing those collations are new collections on a comparable scale, but for two objects which are rarer in textbooks: ‘mixed’ meter (such as 5/4 or 7/8), 1 and the augmented triad (Section 3, Tables 3 and 4). The 1 I use the term ‘mixed’ in the same sense as, and as discussed in Gotham (2015b, fn.1) which settles on the adjective ‘mixed’ as the least-worst option: less bad than