David Fenton provided some examples of engraving at http://www.dfenton.com/Editing/. One thing I noticed: the extreme tightness of spacing. In the day of when paper is relatively cheap: why are so many music engravings don't have much more open spacing in terms of layout?
Surely it can't cost that much more to add three to six pages to a title and allow more spacing to make it easier to read. You could argue I suppose these are critical editions and not meant to be performed from, but still, you imagine people would read these scores for some lengths of time, and eye strain would be a factor.
I know a lot of this is preferences of the publisher; and the engraver has no say in the matter, but I know in terms of regular typography for books, etc: things are much more readable with wide spaces, and opened margins etc.
But that's just me.
Thanks
Kim Patrick Clow
On 5/11/06, David W. Fenton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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/
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Kim Patrick Clow
"There's really only two types of music: good and bad." ~ Rossini
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