UnderScore | The A-R Editions Blog

AMS 2024

Members of the A-R editorial team will soon depart for Chicago and the 2024 American Musicology Society Annual Meeting (November 14-17). At our booth in the exhibit hall you can peruse our newest titles, grab a special discount offer for website shopping, pick up some A-R swag, and test drive both Recent Researches in Music Online and the A-R Online Music Anthology.

Just as importantly, we want to hear from you. Do you have a critical edition in the works? Have an idea for a Recent Researches volume but could use some feedback? Come talk to us! We’re more than happy to discuss any aspect of the proposal and publication process. See you in Chicago!

Can't make it to the conference?

Our information for prospective authors can be found on our website, and questions about your edition ideas or the proposal process can be sent to proposals@areditions.com.

A-R Editions is seeking Expressions of Interest for the position of Series Editor for the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance.

Join a team of world-renowned scholars to help shape the future of one of the longest-running and most active collection of critical music editions, Recent Researches in Music. We are seeking to appoint a new Series Editor for the series dedicated to the music of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The series presents editions of music from ca. 500 to 1500 C.E., encompassing the principal types of both monophony and polyphony that were composed during the period. The editions include a discussion of historical context and performance practices, complete translations of texts, and a critical report.

The Series Editor is responsible for (1) curating the content and maintaining the high quality standards of the series; (2) identifying potential projects and recruiting editors to propose editions for publication in the series; (3) mentoring editors as needed to complete their proposals in a manner that aligns with A-R’s editorial philosophy and house style; (4) reviewing proposals for the series along with the internal reader reports and giving a recommendation on the project; (5) advocating for critical edition-making and A-R Editions both within and beyond the realm of musicology; and (6) maintaining general communication with the editorial staff at A-R Editions.

The Series Editor is an appointed, non-employee role of indeterminate term, although a tenure of 10 to 15 years is common. A-R Editions provides a modest annual honorarium and a complimentary copy of each title published in the series during the appointment period.

Link to further information and application

By A-R's house editors

This post lays out some general rules for the notation of triplets and other tuplets within A-R’s house style, illustrated by examples from our volumes.

On 26 August 2024, MakeMusic announced the sunset of Finale music notation software. This is not happy news for us at A-R Editions, because Finale has been our official music engraving platform since 2007. (Prior to that, we were pioneers in the development of music engraving by computer with our proprietary program, MusE. You can read more about that story here.)

So, what will we do? For the time being, we will continue to use Finale for all of our music engraving. There's no urgency to change, as the software and all of our customizations are working fine. 

But we are also preparing for the future, when Finale is no longer viable for us. Our production team is learning about and testing Dorico Pro. We are only in the initial stages of evaluation, and no decision has been made. Any updates to the situation will be announced here.

Current and future volume editors, do not fear! Our submission guidelines allow for music manuscripts to be submitted using any engraving software, as well as handwritten music pages and marked-up photocopies. This will not change, although we now ask that digital files be submitted in three formats: native files, .musicxml, and PDF. Our house editors and production team will take it from there!

By Luca Della Libera

On 1 June 2024, at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, a dream of mine came true: the first performance in modern times of pieces from my edition of sacred music by Alessandro Melani. The performance took place at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi and featured the Namur Chamber Choir and Cappella Mediterranea under the direction of Leonardo García Alarcón, along with vocal soloists Mariana Flores, Alice Borciani, David Sagastume, and Matteo Bellotto. Melani’s atmospheric settings of Marian antiphons and the litany, along with the monumental Missa Cellesa, were enthusiastically received by both audience and performers.

By Jane Schatkin Hettrick

When you hear the name Salieri, what comes to your mind? A villain? The jealous rival who killed Mozart? If you have seen F. Murray Abraham play Salieri in the award-winning film Amadeus (1984) or perhaps Ian McKellen in the same role in Peter Shaffer’s play on Broadway (1979), you might hold that negative view. Indeed, theatergoers a century and a half earlier would have heard a similar treatment of the composer in Alexander Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri (1831), which likewise focused on the subject of envy (one of the “seven deadly sins”). Keeping the malign portrayal of Salieri going seventy years later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov created an opera, also titled Mozart and Salieri (1898), based on Pushkin’s play. All this and more, all false characterization. Could it be, however, that “bad press was better than no press”? In any event, that question no longer obtains as we prepare to mark in 2025 the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death.

By A-R's house editors

The category of grace notes includes various types of ornamental notation: appoggiaturas, acciaccaturas, coulés, slides, Nachschläge, and many others. This article covers guidelines on styling and formatting them within your edition.

By Esther Criscuola de Laix

Editions of operas, operettas, oratorios, masques, musical theater pieces, and other dramatic or semidramatic pieces include a number of elements unique to dramatic music, from act and scene labeling to stage directions. This post offers guidelines on how to format and present these elements within a critical edition.

By Brian S. Locke

By Brian S. Locke

The landmark edition of Otakar Zich’s 1922 opera Vina (Guilt) in full score came about in an unlikely manner: it began as a “useful side project” while I searched for a tenure-track position. Furthermore, a scrawled inscription, “this piano score is swarming with mistakes,” steered me away from the piano-vocal score toward a transcription of the full score, all in order to hear Zich’s music playback via MIDI. The manuscript I settled on is a fair copy of Vina’s full score, housed in the Music Archive of the National Theatre in Prague. Only when I had transcribed approximately 100 of the manuscript’s 987 total pages did I consider that this project should result in a critical edition. After nine years of work, the three-volume full score edition of Vina in 2014 became the largest contracted project to date (and the first in oversize format) in the history of A-R Editions.

By Jonathan R. J. Drennan

Requiems by Giovanni Croce and Giovanni Rovetta: The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, in the Seventeenth Century (B238) is the inaugural entry in The Requiem Mass at St. Mark’s, a three-part anthology that explores the high (or sung) requiem mass at St. Mark’s, Venice, over the course of four centuries, from the late sixteenth to the last decade of the nineteenth. The anthology, which represents the first-ever attempt to make critical editions of the requiem masses composed by musicians at St. Mark’s, includes abundant new research. There are various objectives here; primarily, I endeavor to tell the story of the Requiem, but the “package,” taken as a whole, serves to provide an engaging musical-cum-liturgical-cum-historical story of St. Mark’s and, ultimately, Venice.