Beyond Ba(t)ch: A Multimodal Meta‑Corpus of Digital Chorale Transcriptions and Related Data

Chorales (broadly speaking, hymns) have featured prominently in the musical life of Western cultures for hundreds of years, particularly in sacred, liturgical settings. They have also featured just as prominently in the theoretical and practical training of musicians and also (more recently) as a focus of attention in computational approaches to music. One strange quirk of that history is the dominance of J.S. Bach’s chorales: for all the many fine qualities of ‘the Bach Chorales’, that collection is neither representative of wider practice, nor (arguably) the most convenient vehicle for pedagogy, particularly at a basic level. This paper reports on a multi‑institutional effort to bring together a wider collection of chorales for musicians and research. This new meta‑collection is still centred on Germany and the 18th century, but features more collections from that regional‑temporal centre and also expands it. The dataset is openly available at https://github.com/Chorale‑Corpus, permissively licenced and indexed at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17229783.