On 21-22 May I was kindly invited to participate with a presentation in the virtual conference “Wasserzeichen und Musikwissenschaft” (Watermarks and Musicology), organised by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Germany. Although most of the presenters were from the field of musicology, there was an exciting variety of experts from other fields, such as conservation and data analysis.
Several points stuck out to me. There were of course many parallels and similarities to watermark research in other disciplines: watermark analysis helps us with dating undated material and with establishing a relative dating of works (the order of development); composers usually used up their paper stocks before they purchased new paper; depending on where the composers lived and worked, paper from different regions was available. And interestingly, several composers used the same paper, Beethoven and Schubert, for example. This leads to my question if there were specialised dealers in music paper: does anybody of you know more?
Concerning technical aspects of watermark imaging, thermographic camera systems are used in a small number of institutions. Unfortunately they are rather costly and need specialists in post-production but they produce strong results. Nevertheless, old watermark drawings and images prove to be still helpful in our research.
General agreement in this conference was that there is still a lot to be done, that there are still many unanswered questions and that we all hope that technical developments will help us answering these questions. So stay tuned for future developments and project results!
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