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.

I approach these realities as one who has long relied on critical editions for work in both scholarship and performance. Indeed, I have edited three volumes of RRMBE myself, making my own modest contributions to the musical repertory associated with early seventeenth-century German Catholicism. As the coordinator of a university early music ensemble, editions of lesser-known repertory such as that featured by A-R Editions have been a welcome staple for performance, and it is always gratifying to present what are in essence Western Canadian premieres of countless pieces of the distant past, newly and expertly edited. But this is hardly a novel role for the critical edition: the emerging discipline of Musikwissenschaft was inconceivable absent the new flurry of collected works of the great “masters” beginning with the Bach-Gesellschaft project in 1851. In some ways, it was the more nationally oriented “monuments” series, such as Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst or Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, that provided a model for critical editing that featured lesser-known or entirely forgotten repertoire—music that could reshape how we understood the soundscapes of particular times and places. It goes without saying, of course, that the early history of critical editing had a heavy bias toward earlier repertories from German-speaking lands, a circumstance that has changed considerably with more expansive geographical and temporal coverage.

If critical editing has welcomed ever-wider swaths of music into its fold, its inherited principles seem to have remained more or less stable: we scour libraries and archives for relevant sources, compare alternative readings, produce a nominally “authoritative” text, and painstakingly record errors and variants. It has become increasingly clear, however, that our methods are not very well suited to traditions that do not privilege systematic music writing and documentary preservation: even within European traditions, how do we account for practices of oral transmission, of improvisation? My own research, for example, has convinced me that between the poles of cultivated polyphony and vernacular monophonic song there was a vast and fluid middle ground of simplified polyphony (falsobordone, the litany) and relatively sophisticated thoroughbass lieder, both of which were accessible to amateurs with a modicum of musical training but resist “authoritative” editions.[1] The American Musicological Society’s recent conference panel “Can the White Page Be Overwritten? Race and Representation in Critical Editions” raised even more fundamental questions about how and whether the discipline of critical editing carries within itself structural biases that systematically deprivilege music outside of a white, Eurocentric perspective.

More pragmatic concerns are also forcing a reckoning. Fewer post-secondary libraries, their budgets increasingly stretched, seem eager to stock their shelves with physical volumes, and some critical editions currently in production can be spectacularly expensive (though not nearly as expensive as ongoing subscriptions to journals in the sciences—but this is a topic for another post). Institutional online subscriptions may be more affordable, but they reinforce an already growing tendency among users (I count myself among them) to prefer the convenience of the internet to the physical effort of visiting research libraries. Fewer volumes pulled from shelves means greater pressures to reduce shelf space and physical collections. As instructors, moreover, we are spending more and more time teaching our students how to recognize quality and peer-review in online scores; if an ever-greater number of critical editions are being made available online, it is frustrating to notice the absence of their accompanying apparatus like introductions and critical reports that would help users to understand the music’s context and make informed choices.[2]

I’m not sure that I have any special insight into this murky future and what may be in store. I can only propose some questions that we might wrestle with. Can we posit, for example, that critical editing remains a crucial tool for scholars and performers, at least for music transmitted via physical media such as notated scores? Given an ever-widening sphere of interest in music that may fall outside of written, Eurocentric practices, can we imagine a “decentered” practice of critical editing that, while remaining true to its inherited methods, makes room for other music and alternative modes of presentation? If traditional editions tend to reify the musical work and its presentation in the form of a physical codex, what might more flexible online editions of historical repertoires look like? A-R Editions’ Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music series provides some useful examples here; I might single out, for instance, Reed Criddle’s recent Chanting the Medicine Buddha Sutra (OT013), for which extensive audio files have been provided to users.

If indeed we are in the midst of a gradual transition toward an online future, what implications will this have for the future of the physical research library, and for accessibility? Access to critical editions has always involved gatekeeping: libraries must have the budget to purchase them and the shelf space to store them, and most often they are carefully guarded by non-circulation policies (with very good reason). Users must have the access privileges, the time, and the motivation to consult them in person. But online editions raise different challenges. Like any institutional subscription, prices may rise with little warning beyond an affordable threshold—and woe to the library that has already canceled its physical subscription! Copyright law will continue to present thorny problems for users, whether in a physical or online universe. What does it mean for a critical score to be published online without its accompanying apparatus: introductions, critical reports, texts and translations? And like any online resource, who owns the server space, and what obligations do they have to publishers, editors, and users? Will copyright law continue to present the same thorny problems that face users of physical editions? All of these questions merit conversations with others that will have far deeper insight (and foresight) than I do, but if we can consider them thoughtfully, I’m hopeful that critical editing can maintain its vitality and adaptability in a rapidly changing world.


Alex Fisher is Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia and the series editor of Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era.



[1] See, for example, Alexander J. Fisher, “Thesaurus Litaniarum: The Symbolism and Practice of Musical Litanies in Counter-Reformation Germany,” Early Music History 34 (2015): 45–95, esp. 64–66, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261127915000066.

[2] The online critical editions available through A-R Editions’ Recent Researches in Music Online library subscription service include the complete text and music of the print editions, as well as performance parts, all in PDF format.