Evan Spencer is the Outreach & Instruction Archivist at UT Arlington Libraries Special Collections, where he oversees the reference and outreach functions of the archives. He is a passionate Public Historian who centers his work on connecting people with historical resources. Prior to his work at UTA Special Collections, he was the Digital Projects Manager at UTA Libraries and a Digitization Archivist at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History
During and immediately after the U.S. – Mexico War, composers brought the turmoil, sadness, and triumph of the battlefield to parlors across the country by writing popular music that captured the essence of war. Intended to be performed by amateur musicians in home parlors, these pieces combined the popular music of the day with descriptions of battles, patriotic symbolism, and laments about fallen soldiers.1
UTA Special Collections is home to dozens of pieces written for popular consumption during the height of the conflict. Through our partnership with the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies, we have recently made 15 of these pieces available in full on our A Continent Divided: The U.S. – Mexico War website. Visitors to the website can view printed covers featuring lithograph images, along with all pages of music. Users can also print the pieces from the website to play on their own pianos!
Since most viewers are not necessarily sitting next to a piano when they are browsing digital collections, and since many people cannot sightread piano music even if they were – we decided to add audio files to the website. Instead of having to wonder what the sheet music might have sounded like, you can now listen to sheet music from over 170 years ago right on A Continent Divided!
Digitizing Sheet Music
Creating digital scans and audio files for A Continent Divided is a multi-step process that involves different departments within UTA Libraries. First, Special Collections’ now retired Cartographic Archivist Ben Huseman identified candidates for digitization. Several sheet music covers had been previously available on the website, so they were the obvious choice to begin our new project. Ben located those pieces and sent them to the Libraries’ digitization lab to be fully scanned.
In the digitization department, I received the music and worked with our student employees – Abigail Moore and Stephanie Coria – to create high resolution digital scans. We then worked on creating descriptions, or what we librarians call “metadata,” for each piece to make it more accessible on the website.
Once each page of the sheet music was scanned and described, my attention turned toward creating audio files so that website viewers can hear the pieces. We wanted to unlock the collection in a new way by allowing users to listen to songs that have faded from our modern memory but were important to so many during the conflict.
After researching different programs that would allow us to create audio versions from sheet music, we selected SmartScore X2 Pro. This program allowed us to scan and digitally recognize the sheet music in our collection, then create MIDI mp3 files that we could upload to A Continent Divided.
The first step was to upload sheet music to SmartScore and run the recognition software. Due to the age and condition of the materials, SmartScore’s ability to recognize the music was greatly diminished. The initial scan (Fig. 1) contained a high number of errors, including missing key signatures, notes, and time signatures, all of which would need to be fixed to create an audio file that would be worth listening to.
Figure 1
Although the initial scans contained a high percentage of errors, SmartScore allows you to manually correct the file to increase the accuracy. With certain pieces, this was a relatively quick process that only required me to insert notes and make other minor corrections. But with Charles Grobe’s Battle of Buena Vista: A Descriptive Fantasie for the Piano pictured in Figure 1 (and linked here), it was a much more arduous project.
Battle of Buena Vista is a phenomenal piece of music that encompasses multiple genres and approaches to battlefield parlor music. There are multiple tempo, time signature, and key signature changes that accompany a full description of the battle and build towards a stirring finale. Creating and editing the SmartScore file for this piece was incredibly time consuming and challenging.
As I edited the notes, keys, and other aspects of each page, I would listen to the music using SmartScore’s playback feature. While listening, I would pick up errors or notice oddities that I had initially missed. Even when using a modern program to recreate songs from the past, music is still an auditory medium!
Once I worked my way through the file, I used SmartScore to create a MIDI mp3 file version of the piece. This would allow us to upload it to the website for others to hear.
To listen to the pieces we uploaded, I recommend searching “Sheet Music” in A Continent Divided, and choosing a piece that looks interesting.
Figure 2
From here, you can simply click play on the bar towards the bottom left – but for the full experience, I highly recommend right-clicking on “View PDF” and opening it in a new tab so that you can follow along with the music as it plays. The new music on A Continent Divided lets you time travel back to the mid 19th Century piano parlor!
