“Development of tools for digital historical-critical music editions” is the correct title of the Edirom project , which is funded by the German Research Foundation since 2006, thus the support of creating and presenting these kinds of music editions – dealing with music from the 18th and 19th century – is the main goal of this venture. Questions concerning the standards for music editions are central as well as questions on the technical and ergonomical needs of editors towards the software.

In several sample editions from Carl Maria von Weber, Antonín Dvořák, Joseph Haydn, Robert Schumann and Johann Sebastian Bach we could evolve and proof the concepts of the presentational part of the software. Each composer has its own specialities and each musicologist its own aims, so the software needs to cover a large field of editorial requirements. Working with facsimiles of the historical scores, the possibility to compare different versions on the fly and linking between text and music (currently image sections) are some of the possibilities the software provides.

While these first editions were all retro-digitalized and in parts hand-made editions, the only practicable way of creating truly digital editions is working within the medium you are writing for – the digital medium. For this reason the so called Edirom Editor is in development; a workbench for editors assisting a digital workflow to create an edition and prepare it for publication. The workbench gives the possibility to organize works respectively editions with the corresponding music sources, editorial texts, historical letters and other material. Scores may be “mapped” in order to have the exact positions of e. g. measures on the image to collate sources measure-wise and to link between measures and textual annotations.

The software is written in Java integrated into an Eclipse Rich Client Platform to have a quasi platform-independent, plug-in based and thus extensible application. All data is held in XML files in a native XML database and is structured according to the TEI P5 Guidelines except the special edition structure and the music. For creating and modifying these files there is an XML editor integrated which supports a “what you see is what you mean”-view which is borrowed from the german TextGrid project. To enhance the possibilities of editorial work there will be an integration of online repositories like the person and document database of the Fachgruppe Freie Forschungsinstitute for individual research purposes and the enrichment of editions with this data.