Sample displays of musical ideas from Prokofiev’s notebooks

Playable transcriptions encoded in MEI and displayed with Verovio

The Serge Prokofiev Archive contains sketchbooks in which Prokofiev wrote out brief, musical ideas. The SPA-data repository makes available a small corpus of these sketches in machine readable form for analysis, in both MEI and MusicXML formats. These pages use Verovio to display an SVG image of the encoded score and to play a midi stream generated from the stored file.

MEI and MusicXML files available under Data Files tab

Fragment 1 Fragment 2
Fragment 3 Fragment 4
Fragment 5 Fragment 6
Fragment 7 Fragment 8
Fragment 9 Fragment 10
Fragment 11 Fragment 12

In a 1986 interview, Prokofiev’s wife Lina described how he used the sketchbooks in his creative process. (The following transcript is also taken from the archive.)

[Serge Prokofiev] was not one of those composers who depend on some special inspiration. His creative gifts were so rich and abundant that he needed only the opportunity to express himself. His mind was a spring from which music was ever ready to gush—he had only to put it down on paper.

SP never stopped creating…. At the most unexpected moment, at the most unusual circumstances—during a conversation or while walking—he would make a note of a new theme in a special notebook he kept in his pocket or on any scrap of paper or on his cuff—on paper napkins in a restaurant. Then on returning home he would copy the themes into a more permanent notebook.

He did so all his life—thus he could always find appropriate thematic material for a new work.