Seminar on the edition of Busoni’s concert program collection

In addition to nearly 9,000 letters written by and to Busoni, the Busoni estate at the Berlin State Library contains numerous other collections, including Busoni’s collection of approximately 600 concert programs. In the summer term of 2026, we will explore ways of incorporating these sources into our edition in a joint hybrid seminar at Humboldt University in Berlin and the Karlsruhe University of Music. The aim is to use this corpus to trace Busoni’s career as a virtuoso and conductor and his respective repertoire, to develop open standard formats for the structured encoding of concert events, to test exchange formats with similarly oriented projects and the central database musiconn.performance, and to explore automation potential (OCR, AI).

Christian Schaper, Tuesday, January 6, 2026