Leone Allemandes Corpus

The corpus we present is comprised of twenty-four allemandes (dance music originating from Germany, usually possessing even meter), written in 1768 by Gabriele Leone (sometimes referred to as Pietro Leone), a mandolin virtuoso from Naples. These pieces were originally included in a method for teaching mandolin to violin players (in particular, the method was dedicated to Louis Philippe II, later known as Philippe Égalité, at the time when he was Duke of Chartres). As such, despite the great technical ability of the author, the pieces are extremely simple and can be played by a novice. All of the allemandes are written for a mandolin duo, ideally having the first part played by the student and the second by the teacher, so all these pieces are polyphonic. In addition, a single instrument often plays chords, so either part may polyphonic on its own. Since the Neapolitan mandolin has only four strings, neither part ever has more than four simultaneous notes.

These pieces are released here in MusicXML format, with added chord annotations. We propose this corpus as a tool for the study of musical structure, as these simple pieces have strong formal regularities. More information can be found on the paper below. 

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If you use this corpus for an academic publication, please cite the following paper: 

Filippo Carnovalini, Antonio Rodà, Nicholas Harley, Steven T. Homer, and Geraint A. Wiggins. 2021. A New Corpus for Computational Music Research and A Novel Method for Musical Structure Analysis. In Audio Mostly 2021 (AM ’21), September 1–3, 2021, virtual/Trento, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3478384.3478402