Laurence Dreyfus

Using Digital Libraries in the Research of the Reception and Interpretation of Richard Wagner's Leitmotifs

This Paper describes a study, which is, as part of the Transforming Musicology-Project, exploring the possibilities, problems and further perspectives of the use of digital libraries (amongst other digital technologies) on a musicological investigation focusing on the reception of Richard Wagners leitmotifs. The main research interest is to achieve a systematic overview and comparison over the large number of different leitmotif interpretations, as they present themselves e.g. in opera introductions or leitmotif threads, in order to carve out influences, cultural or historical patterns of Wagner interpretation. The paper also describes methodological ideas to integrate digital technologies such as digital libraries to pursue this research, namely on three different stages: 1. the sources are gathered by using digital libraries to assemble a digitally accessible body of material; 2. the sources are dealt with and analysed by using tools to operate on the digital data, such as building up a database containing the different leitmotif interpretations; 3. the outcome of the study is defined and presented differently, as a multidimensional digital content combining the digitally accessible sources themselves, the created or applied methods of search and analysis, as well as the presentation of the research insights gained during the study.

Recognition of Leitmotives in Richard Wagner’s Music: An Item Response Theory Approach

In this study we aim to understand listeners’ real-time processing of musical leitmotives. We probe participants’ memory for different leitmotives contained in a 10-min passage from the opera Siegfried by Richard Wagner, and use item response theory to estimate parameters for item difficulty and for participants’ individual recognition ability, as well as to construct novel measurement instruments from questionnaire-based tests. We investigate the relationship between model parameters and objective factors, finding that prior Wagner expertise and musical training were significant predictors of leitmotive recognition ability, while item difficulty is explained by chroma distance and perceived emotional content of the leitmotives.