'Digital Delius' project wins Vice-Chancellor's Public Engagement and JCDL Awards

The 'Digital Delius: Interpretation, Performance, and Analysis' project has won a Project Award in this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Public Engagement with Research Awards. The announcement was made at an awards ceremony at Keble College, Oxford, on 10 July 2019, hosted by Vice-Chancellor Professor Louise Richardson.

The project explored the cosmopolitan connections of the composer Delius and his creative affinity with the landscapes and cultures of other countries. The team created a catalogue of his works which demonstrated his painstaking compositional process and the multiple versions his pieces went through as he refined them.

“We worked with the British Library, the Delius Trust and the Villiers Quartet to create a permanent digital exhibition of Delius’s manuscripts supported by a range of outreach activities”

Professor Daniel Grimley, Faculty of Music, who led the project

“This was fundamentally a team effort, bringing together musicologists, computer scientists, performers and heritage experts, leading to a number of collaborative projects and papers. This research also lays the foundation for future researchers in heritage and digital musicology,” adds Professor Grimley.

The Oxford e-Research Centre's work on the project was led by co-investigator Dr Kevin Page, a Senior Researcher and Associate Member of Faculty within the Department of Engineering Science. As Dr Page highlights, "Digital Delius demonstrates how technologies developed by the team, including our MELD framework, can be used not only to support digital musicology, but also to present this scholarship to new audiences in approachable and exciting ways, increasing public access and understanding." MELD is a flexible software platform for research which combines digital representations of music - such as audio and notation - with contextual and interpretive knowledge in the Semantic Web.

The objectives of the Digital Delius project were to enable wider understanding and appreciation of musical sources, using Delius as a rich case study through access to the manuscripts, to show what they mean and to provide a holistic view of the whole life-cycle of a musical work.

Engagement activities included: a commercially-released recording; a schools workshop with the Oxfordshire County Youth Orchestra, a performance by the orchestra for primary age children; a workshop with the Villiers String Quartet and Oxford students using digital technology; and a seminar for GSCE and A-level students on composer manuscripts.

“It was very interesting to see how composers wrote their music and how they didn’t write it from start to finish but a little bit at a time,” commented a participating school student.

Particular recognition is due to the wider project team, including Dr Joanna Bullivant, Faculty of Music; David Lewis, Engineering Science; Helen Faulkner, The Delius Trust; and Dr Amelie Roper, British Library and James Dickenson, Villiers Quartet.

"These awards highlight the many ways that Oxford’s researchers engage with the public"

Professor Alison Woollard, Academic Champion for Public Engagement with Research, University of Oxford says: “These awards highlight the many ways that Oxford’s researchers engage with the public. This includes informing and empowering people by sharing research findings; working in partnership with communities to shape research and enabling citizens to take part in the research by collecting and analysing data through Citizen Science. These winning projects also demonstrate that excellence in engagement results in a ‘win-win’ for both researchers and publics alike.”