On 2 Feb 2006 at 10:53, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > John Gardiner commissioned a new edition of the Bach Cantatas for his > tour of Europe/US in 2000. I was amazed how quickly the editor was > able to handle this project, given that there are over 200 cantatas, > and gathering the sources must have been daunting. > > Why do Complete Editions by Barenreiter take so much longer versus > something that John Gardiner did?
Well, if you start from a printed edition and edit it from the sources to reflect different readings, that's easier than producing a whole new engraved and printed edition. Second, when producing an edition for your own private use, you don't have to prepart the critical reports to the same degree of completeness as you would for a printed critical edition. Third, the NBA took a long time with the cantatas because they were figuring out what the sources were and what the chronology was (which was the huge discovery of the NBA, that the existing chronology was completely wrong in a huge number of cases). If you're not revisiting all those issues, and just choosing from the sources the NBA and the Bach Compendium say are the ones that exist, then your job is much simpler -- it's *just* the editing, and not all the other parts of the work it takes to lay the groundwork for a critical edition. Of course, that assumes that you are trusting the conclusions of the NBA and the Bach Compendium regarding the source situation and dating. If you're not, then, yes, I guess you'd have much work to do, though it's still substantially easier to provide a different interpretation for a predefined set of sources than it is to figure out what the relevant sources are in the first place. But all of these comments make certain assumptions about how the editions were prepared. I know that some editors don't like putting their collations into existing printed editions because of the human error that inevitably creeps in by failing to eliminate things that are in the edition and not in the sources, and the suggestiveness of the printed interpretation in shaping one's judgment of the sources. But so far as I know, everyone still does it that way, as long as there is an existing printed score to work from. This certainly makes it easier than scoring up a work for the first time. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
