UnderScore | The A-R Editions Blog

By Alexander Dean

A further investigation into accidentals in modern editions of early music, this post deals with the challenges presented by various sources, and how the editor might go about choosing from the available options.

By Pamela Whitcomb

Developing an editorial policy for accidentals can be tricky business, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Converting from archaic conventions to modern ones often means prioritizing either form or function: form-based approaches favor editorial transparency, while function-based approaches prioritize clarity of content. 

By A-R's house editors

’Tis the season for ornaments! Here are a few tips on dealing with trills, turns, mordents, and the like. 

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.

By A-R's house editors

The title of each piece in an edition should usually reflect that given in the source. If the source lacks titles, per se, they can be drawn from a table to contents, devised from text incipits, or based on descriptive attributes. The editorial method should indicate the source of the titles and what kind of alterations (if any) have been made. 

By Alexander Dean

Dr. Andrew Levin’s edition of a viola concerto by a certain Joseph Schubert presented a unique editorial challenge: how to identify and account for the various versions of the piece evident in the surviving performance parts, and how and whether to incorporate the overlapping manuscript markings, especially in the solo viola part. In this case, the additions to the solo part were probably made by the performer, and the performer may have been Schubert himself.

Resolving these questions meant delving into the heart of what makes a critical edition worthwhile. What are the responsibilities of the editor, and what are the opportunities afforded by a source situation such as this? How much can be notated in the score, and what should be relegated to the critical commentary? And for what is in the score, is there a clear way to set off different layers of notation without sacrificing clarity and readability?

By Jennifer Oates

When I stumbled upon a CD of Hamish MacCunn’s music as a young graduate student, I was entranced by the excerpts from his opera Jeanie Deans, whose combination of folk-like music evoking the Scottish countryside, juxtaposed with the surprisingly modern sounding arias, suggested a composer with great range and depth. Most of what has been written about MacCunn and his music has focused on his Scottish artistic persona from 1887 through 1894 and on the Scottish-styled compositions that had cemented this persona and established his career. But while I enjoyed MacCunn’s overtly Scottish compositions, they did not have the range and emotional depth of the music from Jeanie Deans that I had heard on that recording long ago. Where, I wondered, was the dynamic musical style that had so vividly captured my attention? I found the MacCunn of Jeanie Deans in his works for solo instruments (particularly those piano, cello, and violin), partsongs—and especially in his songs.

By Esther Criscuola de Laix

I’d like to talk a bit about pencils, those intriguing sticks of wood, metal, rubber, and a “pigment core” of graphite or something else. In this digital age, not much is done with pencils anymore, because not much is done with paper anymore. But when I sit down to copyedit the music portion of an author’s manuscript, the first thing I do is pull out my pencil pouch. The colored pencils it contains are among the most essential tools of my editorial trade, and each color is used for a specific purpose. Each editor’s individual markup practices vary, but there are three colors that we on the editorial staff at A-R Editions all use pretty much the same way: red, green, and blue.

By Harvey H. Miller

The Recueil de morceaux d’orgue à l’usage spécial des élèves de l’Institution impériale des jeunes aveugles de Paris (1863) is one of the earliest known publications of music in braille notation. Its fifty-four pieces were composed by four blind composers who attended and later taught at the Institution des Jeunes Aveugles, Paris’s school for the blind. With this edition (N071), which includes historical background on the composers, the institution, and braille notation, this music is available to sighted musicians for the first time. The following is the editor’s account of the genesis of this project, which took him upward of ten years to complete.

By Jane Schatkin Hettrick

Six oboes, four clarinets, ten bassoons, one contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, and two timpani—such are the extra instrumental forces that Salieri added to the Vienna Hofkapelle orchestra for an extraordinary occasion in 1804: the inauguration of an empire, when Holy Roman Emperor Franz II became Emperor Franz I of Austria. For this event, Hofkapellmeister Antonio Salieri created his most monumental work of liturgical music, the twelve-movement, double-choir Plenary Mass with Te Deum, published here for the first time. The complete work took shape in stages over several years, being based on a mass Salieri originally composed in 1799, as well a single-choir Te Deum dating back to a setting from 1790. For the 1804 version, Salieri used his original scores but devised letter codes to indicate the new instruments and only sketched out some sections. This historic composition stands apart from all Salieri’s other liturgical music, showing the composer at his grandest.