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The centenaries of former chapters of the British Music Society (BMS), established in 1918, have prompted their governing bodies to take stock of their histories and build on the cataloguing, documentation and preservation of their archival collections. The InterMusE project aims to support this shared instinct to archive by capturing and, crucially, linking different forms of data regarding the musical events provided by three of these local concert-giving organisations, beginning with the digitisation of their collections and with a view to producing a dynamic, open-access digital archive. This paper outlines our approach to establishing a foundation for developing a new kind of digital archive for musicology that is both valuable for researchers, fulfils the needs of the societies and their communities, and sheds light on community music-making on a national and, ultimately, international scale. By carrying out a series of preliminary scoping exercises, including informal interviews and archival-collection assessments, we can compare current archiving and preservation activities across the societies. These conversations bring emerging themes, issues and challenges into focus, raising pertinent questions that will inform our development of transformative tools and techniques for community digitisation projects.

The increasing volume of digital material available to the humanities creates clear potential for crowdsourcing. However, tasks in the digital humanities typically do not satisfy the standard requirement for decomposition into microtasks each of which must require little expertise on behalf of the worker and little context of the broader task. Instead, humanities tasks require scholarly knowledge to perform and even where sub-tasks can be extracted, these often involve broader context of the document or corpus from which they are extracted. That is the tasks are macrotasks, resisting simple decomposition. Building on a case study from musicology, the In Concert project, we will explore both the barriers to crowdsourcing in the creation of digital corpora and also examples where elements of automatic processing or less-expert work are possible in a broader matrix that also includes expert microtasks and macrotasks. Crucially we will see that the macrotask–microtask distinction is nuanced: it is often possible to create a partial decomposition into less-expert microtasks with residual expert macrotasks, and crucially do this in ways that preserve scholarly values.

Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, familiar, often overlooked, and embody vast financial and human investment, not least in their user interface. This paper shows how spreadsheets can be used as an integral part of interactive processes, for activities from simple data entry, to more complex grouping and linking of datasets, both as fully functional prototypes and as part of a final system. They reveal artful digital and physical end-user appropriation; exemplify key design principles including 'appropriate intelligence', ensuring 'smart' technology fits the complete human--computer process; and expose further design issues such as the importance of 'exception' sets.

The story that Mozart was commissioned to write three piano quartets for publication in Franz Anton Hoffmeister's subscription series has proved to be remarkably resilient in the Mozart literature. According to the account that first appeared in Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's biography (1828), Hoffmeister gave Mozart an advance payment for the works, but decided to withdraw after the first quartet, K.478, was poorly received. The article exposes a series of flaws in this narrative by locating Hoffmeister's edition of K.478 in a wider contextual and bibliographical framework than has been hitherto attempted. A revised chain of events, based on a new understanding of Hoffmeister's business, suggests a more complex narrative for Mozart's dealings with the publisher. It also prompts us to reconsider the circumstances surrounding Mozart's composition of his two completed piano quartets and the reception of his chamber music in Vienna before 1791.

The article charts the rise and fall in the dissemination of Boccherini's published music in Vienna before 1800 by examining two sets of documents that have previously attracted little scholarly attention. Artaria's sales catalogues shed light on the burgeoning international trade in printed music after 1779 and the extensive commercial contacts that allowed the firm to offer most of Boccherini's published output for sale during the 1780s. A set of the firm's inventory ledgers documents production of its own editions and allows us to measure the shelf-life of individual Artaria editions from 1784 to 1793. The evidence from these sources reflects a widespread demand for Boccherini's music until the late 1780s and a marked decline thereafter, a trend that led Artaria to withdraw the plates of all its Boccherini publications by 1793.

A previously unknown document witnessing a transaction between Mozart and his principal Viennese publisher, Artaria, appears in an inventory ledger compiled by the firm in 1787. The documentary, financial, and bibliographical contexts suggest that Mozart was paid in advance for six piano trios and twelve songs, but failed to complete the commissions in full. This conclusion casts light on the decline in Mozart's publishing output and the legends that surround his creativity and reception in Vienna between 1787 and 1791. Rather than neglecting the composer, Artaria may simply have been unwilling to offer him more commissions until the existing projects had been finished. iv. 110-11, letter 1130,11. 8-10: 'Nun bin ich gezwungen meine Quartetten (:diese miihsame Arbeit:) um ein Spottgeld herzugeben, nur um in meinen Umstanden Geld in die Hande zu bekommen.' 173 Artaria's edition was advertised in the Wiener Zeitung on 28 Dec. 1791. See Mozart: Dokumente, 376 and Weinmann, Artaria & Comp., 30 (PN 361). 174 Mozart: Letters, 945, letter 587; Mozart: Briefe, iv. 117, letter 1139, 1. 19: 'weil ich fiir H:Schreibe.' 175 According to a recent theory, Mozart planned to write a set of string quintets for Hoffmeister and John Bland, and completed only two before he died: the string quintets in D K. 593 and E flat K. 614. See Ian Woodfield, 'John Bland: London Retailer of the Music of Haydn and Mozart', Music & Letters, 81 (2000), 210-44 at 231.

The transformative promise of the digital humanities is not without problems. This paper looks at digital archive curation using a database of 19th-century London concerts as a case study. We examine some of the barriers faced in its development, related to expertise, volume and complexity, the gap between cost and benefit, and the desire for an authoritative and complete dataset that forces a particular linear process of curation. We explore the potential for more radical approaches where curation and use are interleaved, and where digitally maintained provenance allows professional judgement to be applied to incomplete, crowdsourced, or automatically processed data.