Working Group Digital Music Edition at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz

The constituent meeting of the working group took place on 26 November 2015. The working group focuses particularly on music coding aspects and promoting exchange between MEI and the music editions based at the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. To this end, the working group will organise annual events on specific issues from the musicological edition projects and on the MEI format in the future. This is intended as a reaction to the dynamics of recent years, in which musicological edition methods have changed significantly.

Like TEI, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an international community of scholars who are actively expanding the format and adapting it to new requirements. While MusicXML is very much geared towards the commercial music market, MEI was explicitly designed for scholarly use. Of the long-term musicological projects, all those included in the Academies' programme in recent years now work with MEI: the Carl Maria von Weber Complete Edition, the Reger Works Edition, OPERA, Beethoven's Workshop and Corpus monodicum.

Since 2009, there has been a Council responsible for further MEI development. In the course of 2014, MEI also adopted a new statute, which provides for the Academy Of Sciences and Literature Mainz as host institution. At the end of 2014, the community elected a new MEI Board with nine international members.