I’m on a train. And, more than usually, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Because of my involvement with Transforming Musicology, I’ve been invited to participate in a seminar on Renaissance musicat the Centre d'Études Supérieurs de la Renaissance at Tours. This is a real privilege, and the guest list is a bit intimidating – I went through a French Baroque phase 20 years ago, and it’s therefore nice to be able to bring the book on Marc-Antoine Charpentier to get it autographed by the author.

But if the guest list is intimidating, that’s nothing compared to the format. It has been made very clear that this is not a conference – we don’t have to present research we've already done, but rather our plans for future research that might be of interest to the assembled community. And it will be really interesting for me to hear that, of course, but I will of course be called on to justify my own presence there.

I think I might have two stories to tell. The first is about tools for directly improving the musicologist’s life, with the exemplar I would use being the Gombert/Josquin case study that, depressingly, remains aspirational rather than actual. Here, although more of the pieces are in place than previously, and I do have a complete workflow for examining individual fragments, the thing that is holding up the investigation is that aggregation of search results for those individual fragments into a useful summary suitable for digestion is more challenging and involves more time for concentrated thought than I currently have available.

The second story involves Bernardino de Ribera, and would aim to tell the musicological story from as near as possible to the start – Bruno Turner’s discovery of manuscripts at Toledo and Valencia – to finish, a professional-quality recording. The hope here is that by making the intermediate “data” available (electronic versions of manuscripts, critical editions, recording sessions) as well as links to the commercial performing editions and recording release, we enable a wider community of researchers and enthusiasts to engage with the material, enriching the commons. I should make clear that this story, too, is aspirational; I do not yet have clearance for releasing /any/ of this, and there are many hurdles to overcome before that clearance is given – but here this is intended as a case study of how musicologists and associated parties can publish their work and make them accessible to allow more people to engage with their work. This might address the fears of some that archive-based musicology is a dying art, by making the fruits of the labour much more visible.

The common theme underlying these two stories is, for me, the validation of new knowledge. I am not one who has completely bought in to the “impact” agenda currently driving a fair amount of the evaluation of academic utility in the UK, but I do perhaps take a harder line about the creation of knowledge than some of my colleagues at Goldsmiths, where I strongly feel that new knowledge itself should be communicable to others and not just used in the context of artistic practice. (I should say that my own line has softened quite substantially in the last decade; it is entirely possible that given a few more I will be as arty as the next Goldsmiths academic). The validation of the new knowledge does not have to be fully quantitative or “scientific” – I have certainly mellowed enough to allow that – but there has to be some kind of proof of the pudding, and I strongly think that that proof should be able to be entered into the permanent record and made as accessible as possible, and that this is orthogonal to making a value judgment on individuals or fields of research.

[ update: I’ve arrived. The weather is horrible, but the natives are friendly ]