By Richard Sherr

My edition of the Parisian revue de fin d’année for the year 1857, Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, has its origins in a problem faced by many people my age: “What am I going to do in retirement?” In 2013, after my decision to retire in 2015 had been gleefully accepted by the administration of Smith College, I began to seriously contemplate my future scholarly life. In one sense, the answer was easy. I could continue doing what I had been doing for the past fifty years: working in the Vatican Library on the lives and careers of singers in the papal chapel in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, I was getting tired of it. So, I decided it was time for a change. But what change? I had always liked Paris; what topic could I choose that would bring me to (pre-COVID) Paris as often as possible? As I searched, one genre stood out: the revue de fin d’année, a specifically Parisian genre in which an entire year in the news and the theater was recapitulated in a series of comic and satirical skits. The result is the first edition ever of the complete text and music of a nineteenth-century Parisian revue de fin d’année.

By A-R's house editors

Time signatures are a fundamental attribute of musical notation that indicate the meter in a piece of music. In general, when changing time signatures in an edited score, the score should follow the source. However, there are certain issues to keep in mind that depend on the type of music being edited.

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 those tasks 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.

By A-R's house editors

Starting in the late eighteenth century, it became more widespread for composers in the western canon to notate changes of key signature within a single piece or movement. When incorporating key signature changes into an edition for the Recent Researches series, make sure to keep three important features in mind: double barlines, cautionaries, and cancellation.

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Alexander Dean as managing editor for Recent Researches in Music.

By Drew Edward Davies

My interest in Manuel de Sumaya (1678–1755) began in graduate school, over two decades ago, when I started to research music from New Spain. At that time, the historiography positioned Sumaya—a near-contemporary of J. S. Bach born in Mexico City—as a progressive composer who introduced New Spain to fashionable Italian music. Around 2002, during dissertation research in north-central Mexico at Durango Cathedral, I located a villancico for St. Peter by Sumaya that had been virtually unknown. It was evident in that piece that, despite the composer’s progressive reputation, the music exhibited an older seventeenth-century style with erudite harmonic and contrapuntal elements. Finally, subsequent cataloging work with the Musicat Project in Mexico City brought me into contact with the corpus I would later edit for A-R editions, a series of villancicos that Sumaya wrote for religious services at Mexico City Cathedral during the 1710s and 20s. Through the process of editing these villancicos for A-R Editions, I came to interpret Sumaya in a different light, one that repositions him as a composer but perhaps appreciates him more are a multifaceted priest-musician.

By A-R's house editors

In general, all the rhythmic values in an A-R Recent Researches edition should be transcribed from their source in a 1:1 ratio. That said, it is almost always necessary to make some small graphical adjustments to both notes and rests from most sources. Here is a quick guide to A-R house style for the graphical presentation of notes and rests.

By Samantha Owens

In some ways, it feels as though Johann Sigismund Kusser (or, as he was known in early eighteenth-century Ireland, John Sigismond Cousser) has been following me around since the 1990s, when, during the course of my Ph.D. research, I first became aware of the brief period he was employed as Württemberg court kapellmeister. Born in 1660 in Bratislava (at that time Pressburg, Hungary), Kusser moved to Stuttgart with his family while still a teenager, before going on to study music in France. His professional career began in the early 1680s with a string of kapellmeister appointments at different German courts, as well as several years in Hamburg. After two and a half years working in England as a freelancer, Kusser arrived in Dublin, where he lived the remaining twenty years of his life. Over the course of those years, Kusser would compose and direct performances of more than twenty semi-staged serenatas at Dublin Castle, before the elite audience of the Irish viceregal court.

Series editor Steven Saunders passes the baton to Alexander Fisher.

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.