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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.
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March 10, 2021Read More
By Alexander Dean
As an undergraduate guitar major at the University of Akron in the early 1990s, I entered the library with a seemingly straightforward task: to find the score of Johann Sebastian Bach’s third cello suite, which I would be learning on guitar that semester. The card catalog had by that time been superseded by an online catalog, into which I entered these terms in various combinations. But although I received numerous “hits,” none seemed to promise what I was looking for; instead, I found a confusing multitude of recordings, arrangements, and other loosely related items. The ease and power of the online catalog had lured me into a mindset that allowed for a broader semantic representation of a piece of music than I had actually wanted. Now, in 2020, as an editor of critical editions, I wonder about the ramifications of that mindset—a universal change now that readers use general internet searches to interact with musical scores.
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October 14, 2020Read More
By Loren Ludwig
Donald Rumsfeld once opined that it was the “unknown unknowns”—the stuff you don’t know that you don’t know—that make foreign policy so difficult. A similar problem confronts those fascinated by lacunae in Renaissance and baroque polyphonic music—compositions for which one or more polyphonic parts have been lost to the ravages of history. To those seeking to reconstruct missing parts, and thereby render incomplete pieces playable, a primary challenge is figuring out what, exactly, is unknown. Much can be inferred from surviving voices, particularly if the primary structural voices (often including the cantus and tenor) survive. In this current age of COVID-19, several recent online initiatives have appeared that invite musicians to reconstruct missing polyphonic voices of early works—an activity that seems perfect for the legions of performers and music scholars now sheltering in place indoors with no access to physical library collections.
