The Baermann’s Body project began in January 2023 and it was always my intention to use a project blog to illuminate what is going on behind the scenes. It’s taken a little longer than anticipated to get started but now I have, I will try to be more regular! You can read the overview of the project here.

Since the project officially started I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to work out how to transition from the neat and tidy project plan into the messy reality of actually doing research. One of the challenges with any project of this kind is that the funding application asks you to give a lot of detail about what you are going to do and what the likely outcomes of your research will be - before you’ve done the actual research. So once the project begins, there’s an inevitable shift as you begin to follow the organic unfolding of the research itself. Some areas have immediately become more important and extensive as I have delved into them, and others have receded into the background. Certainly my plans for the order of my research have changed significantly. This feels a bit scary but I’m trying to balance going with the flow and immersing myself in the detail of the work on one hand, with stepping back and keeping an eye on the overall shape and progress of the project on the other. One mental strategy that has helped is to remember what I often tell my own PhD students – that this is only a beginning. I don’t have to do everything in the span of this 2.5-year project, and that the research questions and strands that emerge over the course of my funded period may become directions that I or others follow in years to come.

So what have I actually been doing? Well, aside from a certain amount of project admin - getting websites set up, recruiting staff, learning how to manage the project within the University’s admin structures - my first task was to do a more thorough survey of the primary and secondary source material relating to Baermann. This includes not just the Vollständige Clarinett-Schule and various compositions, but writings and letters, published editions and manuscripts, and archival documents. Eventually the main project output – The Digital Baermann – will include a ‘virtual archive’ of many of these primary sources, which links to material already made available online by libraries and archives, in order to assist others in researching their own questions about Baermann.

What quickly became apparent when I started doing a systematic survey of the sources is just what a huge amount of material there is. There is certainly more than I can look at in the span of my project, and so the aim for this part of the research has become to ‘map’ the Baermann sources and concentrate in more detail on those that are directly relevant to my own artistic research.

For instance, like all 19th century musicians, Baermann’s personal and working life was conducted through letter-writing. The average musician wrote thousands if not tens of thousands of letters throughout their life – corresponding with friends and colleagues, organising concerts and tours and publications, as well as all the more mundane matters that nonetheless had to be transacted in writing. The complete correspondance of Robert and Clara Schumann, for instance, is estimated at c. 20,000 items. Some musicians, such as Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, systematically collected all their incoming correspondance in bound volumes together with drafts of important outgoing letters, creating a systematic record of their business in a similar way that we might organise our email into folders today.

No such systematic collection of Baermann’s letters exists, but because many of his correspondants were major musical or cultural figures, a significant number of letters to and from him are preserved in collections or published editions relating to other people. Thus we catch glimpses of Baermann and his father Heinrich through their correspondance with Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Carl Maria von Weber, Muzio Clementi and others. These artefacts survive because of the significance accorded to these composers, showing how we inevitably view music history through a ‘composer lens’. But by bringing together all the disparate surviving material into one place, we can instead look through a ‘performer lens’ - the life and experiences of Carl Baermann. By mapping his correspondence and reading as many of his letters as possible, I am getting a sense of Baermann as a person and as an artist, as well as where he fitted in to the wider musical culture of mid-19th century Europe.

I will write in more detail on another occasion about the design of The Digital Baermann, which is being built using the SCALAR platform. But it will eventually include an index of the surviving letters, viewable by person, location or by date. Where digital images of the letters or transcriptions of the original German are already available, these will be viewable on the site, and for the letters that are significant to my research I will create English summaries or full translations of the text. I am not trying to create a full scholarly ‘critical edition’ of all of Baermann’s letters – that would require a different skill set and a lot more time than I have available! However, one of the aims of my project is to be open to collaboration, so that anyone who would like to contribute further material, transcriptions or translations to this collection is welcome to do so.

Thank you for reading I hope this has whet your appetite for more!