UnderScore | The A-R Editions Blog

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.

Congratulations to Jonathan Wainwright! His edition of Angelo Notari: Collected Works won the 2023 Claude V. Palisca Prize for best edition or translation, awarded by the American Musicological Society.

A-R Editions is proud to be the publisher of this three-volume edition, which comprises volumes 230, 231, and 232 in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era.

Wainwright joins a prestigious list of previous winners, including several from A-R Editions:

2022: Norm Cohen, Carson Cohen, and Anne Dhu McLucas for An American Singing Heritage
2021: Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett and Aaron Sherber for Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring, Original Ballet Version
2019: Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake: Shuffle Along
2018: Michael Ochs for Joseph

The A-R editorial team will soon depart for Denver and the 2023 Joint Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society and Society of Music Theory. While information for prospective authors can be found on our website, we all know that ideas are sparked and developed in conversation, and we look forward to having many inspiring discussions in the Mile High City. See you soon!

By A-R's house editors

This is the second in a series of UnderScore posts on word division in lyrics within music, covering syllabification guidelines for Spanish and French. Please note that the rules given here may differ in small details from guidelines given in style manuals not primarily concerned with sung texts.

By A-R's house editors

In editing vocal music, one of the most important concerns is, of course, the words being sung. This series of posts aims to clarify A-R’s recommended best practices on word division within music, including rules specific to various languages commonly encountered in the Western art music tradition. This post begins the series with a brief introduction, followed by rules for Latin and Italian.

By Estelle Murphy

My interest in John Eccles (ca. 1668–1735) began with my MPhil research on his court odes. Eccles began his career in London’s theaters around 1690, composing for the United Company at Drury Lane Theater, and then, when the company broke up in 1695, moved with Thomas Betterton to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The songs he composed were enormously popular, and he quickly became one of London’s best-known theater composers. He was appointed to a position as a violinist in the king’s band in 1696 and was made Master of the King’s Musick in 1700; in this position he continued to compose for the theater. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eccles’s approach to the songs in his court odes echoed the style he used for his theater songs, and both types appeared in print as single sheets and alongside one another in collections.