By A-R Editions
On April 10, the last day of the thirtieth annual meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (SSCM), held this year in Newark, Delaware, the panel session “Cut-C, Coloration, and Critical Notes: How We Edit the Music of the Long Seventeenth Century” brought together five panelists, all with extensive and varied experience in critical edition making, to share and discuss various issues, challenges, and approaches in editing the music of the seventeenth century:
- Christine Getz (University of Iowa), president of SSCM and a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sacred music from Milan (which she has edited in R151 and B202);
- Lois Rosow (emerita, Ohio State University), a leading specialist in French baroque opera and editor of Lully’s Armide for the composer’s Œuvres complètes edition published by Olms (Dr. Rosow was unfortunately not able to attend due to family health considerations);
- Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Syracuse University), who has worked extensively (and in a multidisciplinary fashion) on Restoration-era theater music and is a member of the editorial board of A-R Editions’ Works of John Eccles;
- Hendrik Schulze (University of North Texas), who has published widely on seventeenth-century Venetian opera and has prepared groundbreaking collaborative editions of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and L’incoronazione di Poppea; and
- Kimberly Beck Hieb (West Texas A&M University), who has edited sacred music from seventeenth-century Salzburg (B216–17) and written on the intersections of music, piety, and politics at the Salzburg archiepiscopal court.
The panel was chaired by A-R Editions house editor Esther Criscuola de Laix. Each panelist gave a brief presentation before the floor was opened for discussion. The topics were various, thought-provoking, and deeply personal, and covered such ground as the pedagogical potential of critical editing, the handling of meter signatures, a retrospective on the Armide edition, the roles and pitfalls of hierarchical thinking in edition making, editing collaborations, and the house editor’s view. (This last presentation was contributed by Esther, doing double duty as both panelist and chair.)
Even though it was the last session of the conference and held on a Sunday morning, the panel session was well attended, and the discussion following the following the panelists’ presentations was lively and engaging. Critical editing and editions have long been an integral part of the scholarly life of SSCM; we at A-R are pleased to see that they remain so!