editorial methods

By A-R's house editors

An incipit is a brief notational segment placed before the first measure of a piece, in each staff, intended to clarify the relationship between the notation of the edited transcription and that of the source from which the piece has been transcribed. In editions of Western music, incipits are used primarily in editions of music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early baroque, as many of the notational conventions of these earlier eras—particularly those concerning clefs, rhythmic values, meter and key signatures, and metrical organization—differ significantly from those used in modern music engraving. In choral and vocal music of the Renaissance and before, where vocal ranges can be somewhat less standardized than those of later music, it can also be helpful to include range finders at the start of each part as a guide to performers.

By A-R's house editors

This is the third in a series of UnderScore posts on word division in lyrics within music, covering syllabification guidelines for German. Please note that the rules given here may differ in small details from guidelines given in style manuals not primarily concerned with sung texts.

By A-R's house editors

This post lays out some general rules for the notation of triplets and other tuplets within A-R’s house style, illustrated by examples from our volumes.

By A-R's house editors

The category of grace notes includes various types of ornamental notation: appoggiaturas, acciaccaturas, coulés, slides, Nachschläge, and many others. This article covers guidelines on styling and formatting them within your edition.

By Esther Criscuola de Laix

Editions of operas, operettas, oratorios, masques, musical theater pieces, and other dramatic or semidramatic pieces include a number of elements unique to dramatic music, from act and scene labeling to stage directions. This post offers guidelines on how to format and present these elements within a critical edition.

By A-R's house editors

This is the second in a series of UnderScore posts on word division in lyrics within music, covering syllabification guidelines for Spanish and French. Please note that the rules given here may differ in small details from guidelines given in style manuals not primarily concerned with sung texts.

By A-R's house editors

In editing vocal music, one of the most important concerns is, of course, the words being sung. This series of posts aims to clarify A-R’s recommended best practices on word division within music, including rules specific to various languages commonly encountered in the Western art music tradition. This post begins the series with a brief introduction, followed by rules for Latin and Italian.

By Esther Criscuola de Laix

The phrase musica ficta (literally, “fictitious music,” “false music”) comes up in almost every critical edition of medieval or renaissance music ever published. Originally, the term referred to notes that did not fit within the hexachordal system devised by Guido d’Arezzo in the eleventh century and used as the standard music-theoretical system in Western Europe for almost six centuries following. However, when editors of medieval and early modern music use this term, it is specifically to refer to the means and practices of translating into notation the altered pitches that were not expressly notated in written music—the ones early performers would have applied on their own initiative, but which might not automatically occur to modern performers. This article provides a summary of A-R’s house style and recommended practices for notating musica ficta.

By Alex Widstrand

In previous UnderScore posts we have dealt with the broad topic of accidentals, both in terms of tailoring the policy governing accidental usage to the needs of a particular source and more generally how to balance form and function in accidental application. This third installment focuses on cautionary (or “courtesy”) accidentals: those pitch inflections not strictly necessary by standard notation conventions, but that are nonetheless useful in dispelling ambiguity. Since the question of what is or is not musically ambiguous is quite subjective, this post, while by no means exhaustive, offers broad guidance on best practices for deploying cautionary accidentals in a critical edition.

By Alexander Dean

A “critical” edition is concerned with faithfulness to a source, and its authenticity, along with the probity of the editors involved, is bound to an understanding that the source material has been adequately and conscientiously accounted for. But any source will present elements that fall into a gray area, not at once sliding into their place in even the most carefully constructed pre-transcription editorial methodology. Prime among these are layout-specific elements: those numbers, directives, and graphical notations that serve in manuscripts and early music prints to guide readers and performers safely from one page to the next. Since, in the translation to a modern edition, the layout will necessarily change, one might be tempted to dismiss any such marking out of hand, along with the source page numbers and other obvious candidates for tacit removal. While this is not a bad rule of thumb, at least to start out, each type of notation will need to be evaluated on its own.