Helmuth Schaffrath and colleagues at the Hochschule für Musik in Essen, Germany started
putting together the Essen Collection in 1982 while working on a new method for quickly and
accurately encoding printed music into a computer-friendly format named the Essen Associative
Code or “EsAC” (Schaffrath, 1995).
It was divided into twenty-five different subsections, each supposedly named after the
archivist who first collected the printed manuscripts. Under Schaffrath’s successor Ewa DahligTurek’s leadership, and through the work of music scholar David Huron, the folksongs within
the Essen Collection were eventually transcribed from their original EsAC format to the
**kern format (Huron, 1995).
