Use Case
Dr Jasper van der Klis working on copies of sonatas; CC0 No Rights Reserved
The project revealed that phylogenetic analysis of the Texting Scarlatti large dataset with the employment of HPC enhances digital musicology research in ways which were not accessible before.
Research Context
The 'Texting Scarlatti’ project has received funding from The Leverhulme Trust (Grant number RPG-2022-338), Research England Participatory Research Grants and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Professor Sir Barry Ife CBE is the PI of the project at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Dr Jasper van der Kliss is a postdoctoral researcher in the project team.
‘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 research offers a new model for musicological research, combining traditional textual scholarship with digital and collaborative crowdsourcing methods.
What is known of the relationships between the surviving Scarlatti keyboard sources has changed little since the American musicologist Joel Sheveloff's landmark dissertation (1970). 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 means that traditional stemmatic analysis, as Sheveloff attempted, is completely impractical.
The project team of Texting Scarlatti compared almost all surviving eighteenth-century sources, creating an unprecedented dataset of 190,000 variants, recorded in a searchable format readable by both humans and computers. As a DISKAH Fellow, Dr Jasper van der Klis explores how computational phylogenetic analysis – successfully applied to manuscript traditions in literature and, more recently, to musical sources by Windram et al. (2014; 2022) – can aid experts in their analysis of witnesses. Findings to date have revealed unexplored links between sources, suggesting previously unknown routes of transmission. At scale, this approach can transform our understanding of the eighteenth-century transmission of Scarlatti’s keyboard music.
References
Sheveloff, J. L. (1970). The keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti: A re-evaluation of the present state of knowledge in the light of the sources [doctoral dissertation]. Brandeis University
Windram, H. F., Charlston, T., & Howe, C. J. (2014). A phylogenetic analysis of Orlando Gibbons's Prelude in G. Early Music, 42(4), 515–528. https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cau100
Windram, H. F., Charlston, T., Tomita, Y., & Howe, C. J. (2022). A phylogenetic analysis of two Preludes from J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier II. Early Music, 50(3), 373–393
Skills and Support
DIKSAH has enabled Dr van der Klis to access DRI and allocate time for experimentation. The training he received helped him expand his knowledge and skills in dataset preparation and software engineering practices, including version control and debugging. As a result, the software was improved, streamlining the project’s workflow and enhancing preparedness for large-scale analysis. Supported access to the Bede N8 Supercomputer enabled Dr van der Klis to conduct individual experiments and has been critical for efficient code parallelisation, installations, and running on HPC to analyse datasets using different configurations.
Methodology
Dr van der Klis and a group of volunteers gathered digitised versions of 3,300 contemporary manuscripts and printed copies of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas.
The dataset includes images with a minimum resolution of 300 DPI and low-quality microfilm copies, as provided by collaborating libraries. Supported by 30 volunteers, the images for all surviving sources were transcribed and cleaned. Volunteers received training to support this work, which took approximately 10,000-20,000 hours in total to complete. During the project, on the cloud storage (Google Drive) was used to store the dataset and provide volunteers with access to the data.
Thereafter, existing phylogenetic software, including PAUP*, SplitsTree v6, IQ-TREE 2.4.0, and MrBayes 3.2.7 (with the BEAGLE library), was used to analyse the curated datasets, revealing distinct trends that support stemmatic analyses and the genealogical relationships among different sources of Scarlatti’s sonatas.
Access to Bede enabled comparative analyses of configurations with different variant weightings, which can significantly affect stemmatic music analyses. It also accelerated the research, as time was saved – reducing runtime from 40 hours to 30 minutes with GPU parallelisation, demonstrating how access to DRI enhances digital musicology research in ways previously unavailable.
During the fellowship, Dr van der Klis wrote peer-reviewed scholarly outputs and made the datasets available through a dedicated Git repository and the project website under non-commercial CC licences. Future work includes sonata-specific and collection-specific investigations in different music corpora.
Research Impact
The advancements made in the project through engagement with DRI have the potential to enable performers and editors to develop a better understanding of Scarlatti’s works, engage with the original resources and support their decisions on variants selected for their performances. This has led to establishing strong collaborations with leading musicians and institutions, increasing the visibility of the research. Additionally, by clarifying the transmission of Scarlatti’s work through phylogenetic analysis, further metadata can be integrated to enrich existing catalogues of the original resources in libraries and archives.
Project Outputs
Github repository for ‘Texting Scarlatti’ (upcoming)
Training materials - Four-part Google Colab tutorial:
Google Colab Notebook: Texting Scarlatti – Analysing our dataset in Google Colab https://colab.research.google.com/drive/19XpwFw2ylHOG_rjk2iXDfFtLK-e6ATY5
Google Colab Notebook: NEXUS converter, part 1: on how to use phylogenetic software in digital musicology https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1tJDR1Ks1YgoG74M0J-6hHEB0BKvMx7X1
Google Colab Notebook: NEXUS converter, part 2: on how to adjust variant weights and to identify their impact https://colab.research.google.com/drive/16LgdsOXxQ0-WCyIklvAw-kTbCirH074e
Google Colab Notebook: NEXUS converter, part 3: develop your own bespoke weights and save these for use in your own analyses https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-cNUgJcjN5pheTR_bvWzw4eYW58FHsXh
Scholarly publications:
Ife, B. and van der Klis, J. (2025). About Texting Scarlatti: composition, reception, performance. In Ife B. and van der Klis J. (Eds.), Sounding Board 23. British Harpsichord Society, October 2025.
Ife, B. and van der Klis, J. (2025). Texting Scarlatti and phylogenetics. 16th FIMTE Symposium, Vera, Spain, October 2025.
van der Klis, J. (2026). Copying Scarlatti: the provenance of the Münster collection. 21st Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, July 2025.
van der Klis, J. (2026). From Sonatas to Sonnets II: Phylogenetics in Practice. Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) annual conference, Lancaster University, March 2026.
van der Klis, J. (2026). Texting Scarlatti: large-scale phylogenetic analysis in historical musicology. The Digital Conference 2026, King's College London, June 2026.
van der Klis, J. (2026). Transforming structured variant data into phylogenetic diagrams using Python and SplitsTree 6. (under review)
Ife, B., van der Klis, J., Moiraghi, M., Morales, L.. Sources. In Luisa Morales (Ed.), Cambridge Companion to Domenico Scarlatti. Cambridge University Press. (projected 2028)
van der Klis, J. Domenico Scarlatti manuscripts in Berlin. (in preparation)
Ife, B. and van der Klis, J. Texting Scarlatti and phylogenetics. (in preparation)
van der Klis, J. and Ife, B. Texting Scarlatti: large-scale phylogenetic analysis in historical musicology. (in preparation)