Texting Scarlatti: large-scale phylogenetic analysis in historical musicology

'Texting Scarlatti: large-scale phylogenetic analysis in historical musicology' at the The Digital Conference 2026, King's College London, June 2026.
The ‘Texting Scarlatti’ project (Leverhulme Trust, 2023-2025) undertook the first comprehensive, systematic collation of over 3,300 eighteenth-century manuscript and printed copies of the 555 keyboard sonatas by the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). Drawing on methods adapted from the life sciences, we employed phylogenetic software to analyse relationships between extant sources and to help map the transmission of Scarlatti’s music across Europe. Crucially, the dataset for this project was created with the assistance of some thirty (paid) volunteer researchers from around the world. Referred to as the Argos group, our team used a bespoke machine-readable coding system which enabled 190,000 variants to be recorded and analysed. In this paper we reflect on what this project reveals about the current possibilities and limitations of computational methods in historical musicology, and consider the broader implications for reproducibility and collaborative practice in the digital humanities.