By A-R Editions

Patrick Wall is the owner and CEO of A-R Editions. As one of the biggest supporters of our passion for bringing historical music to modern performers and audiences, Pat works tirelessly to keep all of A-R’s departments productive and (perhaps most importantly) solvent. He spoke with us about what that means to him.

By A-R Editions

Most of our readers and volume editors have probably never met Anne Miller, the production-end project manager for all of our Recent Researches series. Yet she is one of the prime movers of every volume that we publish, working closely with both house editors and engravers to supervise all aspects of typesetting, engraving, and production (and keeping us all on our toes in the process!). She sat down with us to share some insights about her job, the Recent Researches production process, its various ups and downs, and what she does outside her work at A-R.

By Danielle Pacha

During my last weeks as managing editor for Recent Researches in Music, I found myself reminiscing about what I thought it would be like to work at A-R Editions versus what it was actually like. I knew that it would involve music editing and proofreading, but those tasks turned out to be the tip of the iceberg in my professional life, with the elements beneath the surface likely to have a more lasting impact on my future endeavors.

By Pamela Whitcomb

Most publishers have a house style—a set of rules and guidelines defining the publisher’s preferences for spelling, punctuation, numbers, dates, abbreviations, bibliographic citations, and so on. A house style usually starts with a commonly accepted, publicly available style guide and a dictionary. The publisher’s house style adds an additional layer of rules for situations in which more than one option is acceptable in the style guide or dictionary or when specialized contexts require more specific guidelines. For music publishers, the house style will also include a set of rules for notational elements. But why all the fuss about these niggling little rules? Why not just let the author’s choices stand?

By Alexander Dean

The cost of each A-R edition is figured very finely, even down to hours per page, at each stage of the editing and production process, and the editions are priced as low as possible while still allowing the company to stay in business.

Our editorial department comprises Ph.D. musicologists who deal with difficult but necessary copyediting tasks: shepherding the creation of something as complex as a historical edition of music requires full-time, trained employees. The work that comes our way is high quality, presented to us by leaders in the field, representing artistic and scholarly creations that could be of lasting benefit to society, and A-R’s editorial department ensures that the editions we produce will fulfill that promise.

By David C. Birchler

In approaching a publisher with the idea of getting your work into print, it is always good to know what sorts of books that publisher specializes in. If you are a musicologist, conductor, or performer interested in creating a new edition of music that you esteem, you may already know that A-R Editions is the world leader in publishing critical editions of music heretofore found only on the shelves of libraries in manuscripts and prints that are decades or hundreds of years old. This post aims to give you some insight into what we call the “proposal stage” of our overall process in bringing music books to publication.

By Danielle Pacha

Last year I participated in a panel discussion on “Careers in Publishing,” sponsored by the Genetics Society of America. I was initially surprised when a colleague from the University of Wisconsin Press asked me to appear on the panel, as I wondered what I—a musicologist—could offer an audience of geneticists. But it turned out that I and my fellow panelists, a mix of STEM and HSS specialists, had more in common than I had expected—and much to collectively share with attendees—due to our common experiences in the world of academic publishing. This post summarizes our conversation, which touched on the state of academic publishing today and potential career paths for those interested in breaking into the field.