On 11 May 2006 at 9:10, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > On 11.05.2006 David W. Fenton wrote: > > I would never bother to make such a distinction in an edition > > intended for anyone other than myself. It's just not valuable > > information, seems to me, except for someone evaluating the critical > > edition, and in that case, the critical notes should suffice without > > having to clutter the musical text with fussy distinctions that are > > of virtually no use to anyone and badly interfere with legibility > > (in my opinion). > > Henle uses this practice for some of the Haydn complete edition. Since > they make parts which completely agree with the score (praise them for > that, it makes my life so much easier) the several layers survive in > the parts. These layers are also usually very appropriate to represent > an ambiguous source situation. In many of Haydns works the autograph > doesn't survive, and all we have are several manuscripts which don't > always give the same text.
I'm not trying to argue with you, Johannes. I just think we are aiming at different audiences for our editions. If I were preparing an edition for *you* to perform from, I'd be delighted to include all the distinctions that indicate editorial interventions of whatever kind. But there is one thing about this approach that bothers me, and that is the idea that everything in multiple sources has to be represented in the edition. If one is producing an edition from a single source, that makes sense to me (in which case, there is no justification for using both square and round brackets). But when you're producing an edition that's a collation of multiple sources, you have a different set of problems that involve resolving the contraditions between different readings. One source could have an internally consistent set of readings that differ from those of a different source that is itself also internally consistent. If you conflate those two into a third text, you're taking two distinct internally consistent texts and constructing a text that can't possibly be internally consistent. By including all the information about what's editorial and what's drawn from some but not all sources you're leaving the performer to make choices one at a time, instead of as a whole. I think it's justified for an editor to either choose one edition as a leading source and leave out emendations from other sources that are not consistent with the text of the leading source, or for the editor to try to construct an artifical best set of readings from all the sources in an effort to capture the composer's original intent (in the absence of any direct evidence of that, of course). The more practical consideration for me, though, is that I would hope that my editions will be used by lots of performers, not just by scholarly and informed ones like yourself -- you type is hopelessly outnumbered, Johnannes, unfortunately. My experience with professionally trained musicians is that, unless they have specific early music training or are trained somewhere that propagates an ingrained scholarly attitude to editions (such as Oberlin Conservatory), they are going to play what's on the page, and make no attempt to consider what's editorial and what's original. They don't care, unfortunately. And even if they did, they often don't have the training and experience to properly evaluate that information and make a consistent performance out of it. Last of all, if the Ordonez example causes *me* to scratch my head, someone who has all the training and experience in regard to creating and reading critical editions, what can the square/round bracket distinction possibly be conveying to those without such training? Unless the resulting composite of all the editorial and source readings produces a coherent performance, the result will not be very good. I definitely believe that an editor has an affirmative responsibility to make decisions about what the best readings are to present to performers. This doesn't mean the editor should hide her decisions, just that the decisions should be made. Slavishly collating all readings into a single conflated text is something I think you'd agree is a bad thing (and I'm certain it's not something you'd advocate as best practice). But once you're not presenting everything in the sources, the value of distinguishing editorial from "source- disagreeing" readings seems to me to be greatly lessened. But perhaps my feelings on this are colored by the fact that I do the majority of my editing of single-source works (i.e., there's only one surviving text to edit, or one surviving lineage of sources, each based on the other, instead of bearing independent readings). If I were editing material with multiple independent sources, I might see much more value in presenting the distinction in the edition itself. -- 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
