A music technology/composition professor and a music librarian/musicologist mentored a small team of undergraduates in a summer 2017 research project that involved editing music manuscripts held at the Library of Congress. The music was composed by Mannheim cellist and conductor Peter Ritter (1763-1846). During the ten weeks of the project, five students inspected manuscripts and selected particular scores to transcribe and edit for modern performance. Edited scores and parts were converted to PDF files and uploaded to International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) for world-wide open-access, and selections of chamber music were publicly performed at a summer’s end celebration of student research. 2nd- and 3rd-year Music majors with little or no background in editing learned to use notation software, decipher musical handwriting from an earlier period, investigate related biographical and historical matters, learn about performance practices, plan a short concert, coach performers, exhibit personal research processes and findings, and make meaningful contributions to a major digital repository.
