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November 13, 2020Read More
By Pamela Whitcomb
Most publishers have a house style—a set of rules and guidelines defining the publisher’s preferences for spelling, punctuation, numbers, dates, abbreviations, bibliographic citations, and so on. A house style usually starts with a commonly accepted, publicly available style guide and a dictionary. The publisher’s house style adds an additional layer of rules for situations in which more than one option is acceptable in the style guide or dictionary or when specialized contexts require more specific guidelines. For music publishers, the house style will also include a set of rules for notational elements. But why all the fuss about these niggling little rules? Why not just let the author’s choices stand?
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August 19, 2020Read More
By David C. Birchler
Performance parts are often overlooked or placed last in a list of sources. It is understandable that an extant autograph score is considered to be the primary source for a symphony, concerto, mass, or opera; or that a copyist’s score or published score, particularly one prepared under the composer’s supervision, would be chosen as primary source if the autograph is lost or presents an earlier or indeed superseded version of the work. But parts have a strength of their own in that they are specifically tailored to meeting the needs of individual players for the realization of the work in performance. Taking careful account of available source parts as you are preparing your edition will often provide details of notation that are only implied in the source score and make your job that much easier.
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July 17, 2019Read More
By David C. Birchler
In approaching a publisher with the idea of getting your work into print, it is always good to know what sorts of books that publisher specializes in. If you are a musicologist, conductor, or performer interested in creating a new edition of music that you esteem, you may already know that A-R Editions is the world leader in publishing critical editions of music heretofore found only on the shelves of libraries in manuscripts and prints that are decades or hundreds of years old. This post aims to give you some insight into what we call the “proposal stage” of our overall process in bringing music books to publication.
