Jasper van der Klis

‘Texting Scarlatti’ is the first comprehensive study of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas based on analysis of over 3,300 contemporary manuscripts and printed copies. This pioneering work offers a new model for musicological research, combining traditional textual scholarship with cutting-edge technology and collaborative crowdsourcing methods.
What we know of the relationships between the surviving Scarlatti keyboard sources has changed little since the American musicologist Joel Sheveloff's landmark 1970 dissertation. While new sources have come to light, placing them within their context has remained a monumental task: the number of extant sources and variant readings mean that traditional stemmatic analysis, as Sheveloff attempted, is completely impractical.
We have compared almost all surviving eighteenth-century sources, creating an unprecedented dataset of 190,000 variants recorded in a searchable format readable both by humans and by computers. As a DISKAH Fellow I explore how computational phylogenetic analysis – successfully applied to manuscript traditions in literature and recently to musical sources by Windram et al. (2014; 2022) – can aid experts in their analysis of the witnesses. Findings to date have revealed unexplored links between sources suggesting previously unknown routes of transmission. At scale this approach will transform our understanding of the eighteenth-century manuscript transmission of Scarlatti’s keyboard music.