Digital Forensics, Textual Criticism, and the Born Digital Musical

1
Digital Forensics, Textual
Criticism, and the Born
Digital Musical
Doug Reside
dougreside@gmail.com
Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities, University of Maryland, USA
When Jonathan Larson, author of the hit
Broadway musical
RENT
, died in 1996 just
before his work opened off-Broadway, he left
behind about 180 floppy disks containing,
among other things, drafts of the musical
composed over a period of about six years. These
disks, which were donated to the Library of
Congress and are now held there, represent one
of the earliest examples of a "hybrid archive" - a
collection of both paper and inextricably digital
artifacts. Along with a series of timestamped
Microsoft Word 5.1 documents, the disks also
preserve early and transitional versions of the
music in MIDI and MOTU Performer format
that could not easily be transferred to a
more traditional medium without significant
loss. In this poster I show some of what I
found on these disks, what it reveals about
the creative processes that shaped
RENT
, and,
more generally, how the lessons learned in my
experience might be applied by others working
with hybrid archives.
The earliest file on the Library of Congress
disks relating to
RENT
is a version of the
music for the title song timestamped 1:37 p.m.
on December 21, 1989 and created with the
musical editing program Performer (now called
Digital Performer). Accessing this file was not
an easy matter. I had planned to create an
image of the disks using the "dd" disk imaging
command built into most versions of Linux, but,
unfortunately, the disks were formatted in the
800K HFS disk format and could not be natively
read by a "modern" floppy drive. I therefore used
a live CD install of Ubuntu 5.02 running on a
Powerbook G3 to create the image. Of course, if
I had not had access to this Powerbook, things
would have been slightly more complicated. I
could, perhaps, have brought a desktop with a
third party floppy controller card (such as the
Catweasel PCI card manufactured by Individual
Computers), but getting such a bulky machine to
the Library of Congress and through the airport
level security would have been difficult. The
Powerbook was an indispensible tool and well
worth an eBay purchase for those doing similar
work. Once the disk image was created I made
a second working copy, mounted it on Mac OS
X (the current version of the operating system
still supports disk images in legacy formats) and
used a modern version of Digital Performer to
open the file.
Note, however, that this digital file is not
the earliest draft of
RENT
in the Library of
Congress collection. There is a paper copy of the
script that was probably written in mid-1989 by
Larson's collaborator Billy Aronson. The draft
is an 11 page, typescript that appears to have
been produced on Aronson's letter-quality NEC
printer. The draft is labeled "pre-lyric" and, true
to this label, contains no songs but does include
some relatively lyrical language (especially by
Mimi who has lines like: "I embroider sunsets
onto pillowcases. Well, now you know..."). The
second draft in the collection, again paper
and probably produced by the same typewriter
used to produce the pre-lyric draft is labeled
"Boheme" and dated 9/22/89. It assigns sole
responsibility for the book and lyrics to Billy
Aronson and the music to Larson and was, again,
likely typed by Aronson. Most of the songs in this
draft did not make it to the final version of the
show, however the draft does contain versions of
the songs "Rent" and "I Should Tell You" and, in
more or less the form it is now known, "Santa
Fe" (indeed, the program notes for
RENT
always
credit Aronson for his work on these songs).
Although the broad details of the narrative that
begins to emerge from this archive are well
known (Billy Aronson and Jonathan Larson
decided to collaborate on the musical, Larson
initially only as composer, and together wrote
three songs before going their separate ways),
the digital and paper artifacts together fill out
the story with precise and fascinating detail. For
instance, although Larson probably received a
script from Aronson by September (based on
the date on the first script in the collection)
and by November at latest (interleaved into the
second draft is a letter from Aronson to Larson
dated 12/1 which Aronson begins with the words
"Here's the new last chorus for SANTA FE that

2
you asked for"), Larson did not commit any
work on the show to disk until December 21.
The letter from Aronson indicates that Larson
was probably working on the show before then,
but likely recording his work, if at all, to analog
media (perhaps, as he certainly did in other
cases, to a cassette tape). However, in order to
transcribe the music to digital format Larson
required technology he did not have at home.
Another Word Document on the disks dated
1/31/90 and named "STUDIO COSTS" appears
to have been a kind of invoice to Aronson. It lists
three studio visits, one for 6 hours on December
21 to create "Music Trax for SANTA FE &
RENT," one for 4.5 hours on January 16 to create
"Music Trax for I SHOULD TELL YOU" and one
for 7.5 hours on January 30 to "Record Vocals
for ALL SONGS" and to create "Mix Trax for ALL
SONGS." That Larson sought out a digital studio
so early in the creative process (and was willing
to pay about $300 per session at a time when
his primary source of income was part-time
work at a diner) suggests how important Larson
saw digital technology for his creative process.
To truly understand
RENT
, then, the scholar
must understand the digital technologies and
processes used to create it. The textual critic
of
RENT
and other born digital musicals must
therefore be skilled in recovering, reading, and
analyzing digital artifacts - the processes I hope
to demonstrate in this introduction to my work
with
RENT
.