UnderScore | The A-R Editions Blog

By A-R Editions

On April 10, the last day of the 30th annual meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (SSCM), the panel session “Cut-C, Coloration, and Critical Notes: How We Edit the Music of the Long Seventeenth Century” brought together five panelists, all with extensive and varied experience in critical edition making, to share and discuss various aspects, challenges, and approaches in editing the music of the seventeenth century.

We are pleased to announce that the A-R website is getting a new look soon!

By A-R's house editors

In Western ensemble music, various brackets and braces are used to distinguish groups of instruments by family, type, or both. This article gives an overview of their functions and tips for their correct use.

By A-R's house editors

In Western art music of the common-practice period, barlines are used to divide written or printed music into metrical sections, or measures. In general, the placement of barlines should follow the source, with differences noted in the critical notes or in a general editorial statement. This article provides an overview of the most basic types of barlines and offers tips on how to use them correctly and consistently.

By Alex Fisher

It is hard to escape the impression that the discipline of critical editing is at a crossroads. If taking on the series editorship of Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era last spring has sharpened my attention to this question, the fact of the matter is that rapidly advancing digital access, the changing budgets and priorities of research libraries, and shifting winds in the field have all been unsettling the ground beneath us for quite some time.

By A-R Editions

On the last day of the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, a professional development roundtable took place that is potentially of great import to the future of critical edition editing and publishing. “Can the White Page be Overwritten? Race and Representation in Critical Editions” brought together four panelists, all of whom actively work with editing, performing, or cataloging the work of underrepresented composers.

By A-R's house editors

Stemming appears, at first glance, a straightforward issue. Indeed, A-R house style employs very simple rules for stemming single notes and chords. However, stemming rules regarding multiple melodic lines and parts on a single staff are slightly more complex. Following a brief introduction to the basic rules of stemming, this article will address these more complicated scenarios.

By A-R Editions

The upcoming online meeting of the American Musicological Society will include a professional development roundtable session: “Can the White Page be Overwritten?: Race and Representation in Critical Editions.” The session will take place on 21 November from 11:00 AM to 12:50 PM and will feature an impressive lineup of speakers. Turn on, log in, and drop by for what is sure to be a thought-provoking experience!

By Robert Crowe

Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780–1861), or Giambattista, or even Gianni, as some of his friends seem to have called him, has been my constant companion since 2011. Back when I thought Angus Heriot’s 1956 The Castrati in Opera was a good, reliable source (was I ever so young?), Velluti’s wild life, full of saucy stories of flirtations—and more—with divas both operatic and aristocratic, of narrow escapes from their jealous boyfriends, of improbably witty badinage with emperors, queens, and skeptical policemen of all descriptions, was highly entertaining. But what really piqued my curiosity was his life and all of its collisions with the surrounding world—a stranger in a strange land—dragging all the accoutrements of the eighteenth century with him, deep into the nineteenth. Stared at, gossiped about, closely observed, lied about, mythologized, lionized, “monstered”—all while he was walking the same streets with those who were busily rewriting—and redrawing—his existence. I got to know him first as a newspaper figure, a caricature, but as I dug deeper, I found more and more sources that dug more deeply in the man himself.

By Richard Sherr

My edition of the Parisian revue de fin d’année for the year 1857, Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, has its origins in a problem faced by many people my age: “What am I going to do in retirement?” In 2013, after my decision to retire in 2015 had been gleefully accepted by the administration of Smith College, I began to seriously contemplate my future scholarly life. In one sense, the answer was easy. I could continue doing what I had been doing for the past fifty years: working in the Vatican Library on the lives and careers of singers in the papal chapel in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, I was getting tired of it. So, I decided it was time for a change. But what change? I had always liked Paris; what topic could I choose that would bring me to (pre-COVID) Paris as often as possible? As I searched, one genre stood out: the revue de fin d’année, a specifically Parisian genre in which an entire year in the news and the theater was recapitulated in a series of comic and satirical skits. The result is the first edition ever of the complete text and music of a nineteenth-century Parisian revue de fin d’année.