critical edition

By Brian S. Locke

By Brian S. Locke

The landmark edition of Otakar Zich’s 1922 opera Vina (Guilt) in full score came about in an unlikely manner: it began as a “useful side project” while I searched for a tenure-track position. Furthermore, a scrawled inscription, “this piano score is swarming with mistakes,” steered me away from the piano-vocal score toward a transcription of the full score, all in order to hear Zich’s music playback via MIDI. The manuscript I settled on is a fair copy of Vina’s full score, housed in the Music Archive of the National Theatre in Prague. Only when I had transcribed approximately 100 of the manuscript’s 987 total pages did I consider that this project should result in a critical edition. After nine years of work, the three-volume full score edition of Vina in 2014 became the largest contracted project to date (and the first in oversize format) in the history of A-R Editions.

Congratulations to Jonathan Wainwright! His edition of Angelo Notari: Collected Works won the 2023 Claude V. Palisca Prize for best edition or translation, awarded by the American Musicological Society.

A-R Editions is proud to be the publisher of this three-volume edition, which comprises volumes 230, 231, and 232 in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era.

Wainwright joins a prestigious list of previous winners, including several from A-R Editions:

2022: Norm Cohen, Carson Cohen, and Anne Dhu McLucas for An American Singing Heritage
2021: Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett and Aaron Sherber for Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring, Original Ballet Version
2019: Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake: Shuffle Along
2018: Michael Ochs for Joseph

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 The card catalog had by that time been superseded by an online catalog, into which I entered these terms in various combinations.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.

Congratulations to Michael Ochs! His edition of Joseph Rumshinsky's Di goldene kale won the 2018 Claude V. Palisca Prize for best edition or translation, awarded by the American Musicological Society.