Encoding polymeter: A corpus of Hugo Distler's «Der Jahrkreis» op. 5 in different symbolic formats

Lucas Hofmann, Craig S. Sapp, Fabian C. Moss
April 2026 music theory

Abstract

We present DistlerCorpus, a corpus of Hugo Distler’s Der Jahrkreis op. 5 (1933), a collection of 52 predominantly three-voice motets. The corpus is provided in Humdrum and MEI formats. The creation of the data set addresses Distler’s distinctive notational treatment of polymeter: voice-specific time signatures and the resulting non-aligned barlines, combined with frequent homometric meter changes. These characteristics expose limitations in current symbolic music encoding formats (MusicXML, MuseScoreXML, MEI, Humdrum) and motivate our proposed recommendations for encoding polymetric notation in digital music corpora.

Type
Conference paper
music encoding Symbolic Corpus polymeter Humdrum MEI MusicXML MuseScoreXML MIDI Hugo Distler
Fabian C. Moss
Fabian C. Moss
Digital Music Philology and Music Theory

Fabian C. Moss is an assistant professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory at Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg (JMU), Germany.

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