The Cantigas de Santa Maria for Singers website

The 13th-century Cantigas de Santa Maria comprises one of the most popular repertories for modern performers of medieval music. Sung performances have, however, suffered from the lack of a good performing edition that fully underlays all the words of all stanzas to the music for the complete set of 420 songs, clarifies unambiguously the fit between syllables and note shapes and makes all aspects of pronunciation explicit. The independent Cantigas de Santa Maria for Singers project (www.cantigasdesantamaria.com) was begun in 2010 to create such an edition, combining an augmented presentation of Walter Mettmann's edition of the text with a new transcription of the musical notation from the original manuscripts. It was designed from scratch as an online edition in order to take full advantage of the flexibility of web publishing over print, and is available free to all. In this article I describe the technologies used in construction of the website and the featuers it offers to users, along with some spin-off work, including NeumePad—a general purpose transcription tool for medieval square notation.