Tondauer
In 2020 I started a project called Tondauer, to make Creative Commons licensed editions of sheet music. It happened because of the Covid-19 lockdown that year: I was learning to play Felix Mendelssohn’s Prelude Op. 104a, No. 2 (MWV U 123), because it suited my mood of restless frustration at the time. I started with a 19th-century edition that could be downloaded for free. Then I bought an edition with fingerings, and wondered why it had different notes. I looked in vain for the composer’s manuscript, but found only an earlier draft. I had been reading R. Larry Todd’s biography of Mendelssohn, so I emailed him to ask if he knew where the manuscript of the final version was, and he replied that it hadn’t been found. This meant that the only sources were the first editions, which were published after the composer’s death.
SocioResources
My old blog (2013-2021) on the sociology of autonomy and the autonomy of sociology.
أبحاث لفتت نظري
My old Arabic blog (2009-2014) on which I summarised research that I thought was interesting: أبحاث لفتت نظري.
accicalc
In 2023 I wrote a program that makes spreadsheets of data about traffic accidents in France: accicalc. The data is available online, but difficult to work with. This little program is useful if, for example, you want details of all accidents involving pedestrians or cyclists in a given municipality, including the address or geographical coordinates. It was a good exercise for learning Go, but if I were implementing it now, I’d probably use sqlite.
Fanny Hensel – September
In 1841, Fanny Hensel (1805–1847) wrote Das Jahr (The Year), a large-scale piano cycle with a movement for each month of the year. She published “September” in 1846 as part of her Op. 2, but Das Jahr was first published in its entirety in 1989. Subsequently, a magnificent revised autograph manuscript was discovered, in which each movement is copied on paper of a different colour, illustrated with a drawing by Hensel’s husband Wilhelm, and preceded by a poetic epigram. Furore Verlag has published a critical edition.