Texting Scarlatti: Composition, Reception, Performance

Project dates: January 2023 - August 2025

Project team: Professor Sir Barry Ife (PI), Dr Jasper van der Klis, Professor Marco Moiraghi, Dr Luisa Morales

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

The ‘Texting Scarlatti’ project is the first comprehensive attempt to track the genesis, reception and performance of Scarlatti’s music by examining all the extant eighteenth-century manuscript and printed copies of his keyboard sonatas. Using a combination of traditional textual criticism, large-scale computerised data management and a collaborative approach, the aim has been to map the major routes of circulation and their implied chronologies.

This has involved detailed bar-by-bar, note-by-note collation of all 3,300 surviving witnesses, a process that demands careful attention to detail and skilled judgement. The core team of specialists has been supported by up to 30 volunteer ‘citizen scientists’ from around the world, many of whom are professional performers and teachers. To date, nearly 190,000 variants have been identified, recorded in human- and machine-readable form and analysed using phylogenetic software borrowed from the biological sciences.

This work was made possible by a major grant from the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2022-338) and Research England ‘participatory research’ funding via institutional QR. Project data, analysis and discussion can be seen on the full project website (textingscarlatti.gsmd.ac.uk)