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 I never imaged that I would become adept at using spreadsheets to estimate page counts and map out a publishing schedule, among many other things. The actual editing of music 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.

I first learned about Recent Researches in a bibliography class at the University of Washington, during my first year of graduate school. My classmates and I had each been asked to prepare a report on a reference tool available in the music library, and I was assigned the Recent Researches collection. As I paged through various volumes taking notes, I was amazed to see so much unfamiliar music; more significantly, I was impressed with the way that music was handled and presented. These were series of “critical editions,” each with a clear description of the source(s), an editorial method that explained how the music was edited, and specialized markings to identify editorial interventions throughout the transcriptions. Having been a collaborative pianist who practically knew by heart the highlights from Twenty-four Italian Songs and Arias, the critical edition was a new concept for me.

Years later, while working on my Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis, I transcribed a large body of twelfth-century organa into modern notation for two volumes in the Magnus liber organi edition. By that point, I felt very comfortable with the critical edition and the conventions for transcribing early music notation. Upon finishing my degree, I wondered if A-R could be a good professional fit or me, so I checked their website and saw that there was an opening on the Recent Researches editorial staff.

Part of the application process involved taking a test that assessed proofreading and editing abilities. I aced the proofreading portion (which featured a Renaissance motet)—thanks in part to my background in early music—and did quite well on the music editing section (a baroque trumpet concerto). But to be honest, my text editing was subpar at that point, since I didn’t really know how to approach it. I considered myself to be a fairly skilled writer, but creating written material from scratch seemed very different from editing someone else’s written work. Also, while I had certainly become familiar with the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) in graduate school, I didn’t realize just how vast its stylistic protocols were. (Did you know that when abbreviating French social titles, you should use periods for M. and MM. [short for Monsieur and Messieurs] but that Mme and Mlle “are considered contractions and therefore do not take a period”?) I therefore took a hands-off approach to the text-editing portion of the test, when I should have spent significant time reworking the large-scale organization, improving the flow of the language, querying unclear elements, fact checking, and systematically applying CMS style.

Fortunately, the committee gave me a second chance with the text, and I performed well enough to be offered the job. It’s funny to remember this slightly rough start to my editorial life, since text editing eventually became one of my favorite parts of the job. I came to enjoy the challenge of applying Recent Researches house style and polishing the language without obscuring the writer’s intended message. Sometimes that was a relatively simple task, perhaps involving as little as adjusting the punctuation, replacing British with American spellings, and updating the note citations to follow CMS. Other times it was like doing a complicated puzzle—what if we moved this paragraph here, placed this material in a note (to avoid disrupting the primary discussion), and saved this tangential material for a separate article? In these cases, my goal as an editor was to pinpoint the essential arguments and ensure that the rest of the text contributed to making them shine.

One year every member of the Recent Researches editorial staff read a copy of The Subversive Copy Editor, by Carol Fisher Saller, and her insights particularly resonated with me. She covers the nuts-and-bolts of copyediting with witty chapters like “Know Thy Word Processor” and is especially enlightening when discussing the relationship-building side of the job. The “subversive” concepts are that editors should be working on behalf of the reader, not the writer, to ensure that they will engage with the content; and that editors should approach their work with grace and flexibility, because there is no such thing as a “perfect” manuscript. What a wise woman!

The ability to negotiate good relationships became even more essential to my job when I became managing editor in 2015, and my sphere of professional interactions expanded. I continued to work directly with individual writers (as they finalized and submitted manuscripts), but I also served as leader of the A-R editorial staff, liaison between the editorial and production teams, and coordinator for outside colleagues and industry specialists (freelance proofreaders, printer representatives, copyright office personnel, etc.). My use of spreadsheets and other tracking tools increased exponentially during this time, and I became simultaneously focused on big-picture elements (such as budgets and deadlines) and the minutiae of book design (such as font style, leading, and page balancing). In an environment that bridges academia and the business world, much of my time was spent setting schedules, establishing benchmarks, and developing methods for monitoring progress and improving efficiency.

While on certain days there was an element of herding cats to my job, my time at A-R, especially as Recent Researches in Music managing editor, was immensely rewarding for me, because it offered a great deal of professional growth and an opportunity to make a difference within my chosen field of musicology; and because I thoroughly enjoyed the collaborative interactions it required. I can only hope that my new chapter will be as gratifying as my career in music editing has been.

Danielle Pacha received her Ph.D. in musicology from Washington University in St. Louis; she also holds degrees from the University of Washington (M.A., musicology) and Central Washington University (B.A., piano performance). She developed an interest in early music as an undergraduate, and her dissertation focused on a family of thirteenth-century motets. She started her career at A-R as an editor in 2003 and served as managing editor from 2015 to June 2021.