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    Writing about Music: A Style Sheet
    Writing about Music: A Style Sheet
    Writing about Music: A Style Sheet
    Ebook195 pages1 hour

    Writing about Music: A Style Sheet

    By D. Kern Holoman

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    About this ebook

    Where do you place the hyphen in "Beethoven" if it breaks between two lines? How do you cite John Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme? Is it "premiere" or "première"? The answers and much more can be found in this definitive resource for authors, students, editors, concert producers—anyone who deals with music in print. Extending the principles devised for the classical repertoires, this revised and expanded edition now includes examples from world music, rock, jazz, popular music, and cinema. This essential volume covers some of the thorniest issues of musical discourse: how to go about describing musical works and procedures in prose, the rules for citations in notes and bibliography, and proper preparation of such materials as musical examples, tables, and illustrations. One section discusses program notes, while others explain the requirements for submitting manuscripts and electronic files, and outline best practices for student writers. An appendix lists common problem words. Updates include greatly simplified citations of Internet locators, the recognition of multiple platforms, and the expectation of paperless transmission and storage of work. Cited as the authority by The Chicago Manual of Style, this classic handbook is the go-to source for anyone writing about music.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateSep 5, 2014
    ISBN9780520958814
    Writing about Music: A Style Sheet
    Author

    D. Kern Holoman

    D. Kern Holoman is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California, Davis, where he conducted the UCD Symphony Orchestra for more than three decades. He is the author of Berlioz; Evenings with the Orchestra; Masterworks; The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967; Charles Munch; and The Orchestra: A Very Short Introduction.

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      Book preview

      Writing about Music - D. Kern Holoman

      Writing about Music

      Writing about Music

      A Style Sheet

      THIRD EDITION

      D. Kern Holoman

      UC Logo

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Oakland, California

      © 2014 by D. Kern Holoman and

      The Regents of the University of California

      The tables and examples are adapted, with permission, from the following sources. Table 1: Paul A. Bertagnolli, Amanuensis or Author? The Liszt-Raff Collaboration Revisited, 19th-Century Music 26, no. 1 (2002): 38. Table 2: Will Crutchfield, Vocal Ornamentation in Verdi: The Phonographic Evidence, 19th-Century Music 7, no. 1 (1983): 51. Table 3: Richard Kramer, Schubert’s Heine, 19th-Century Music 8, no. 3 (1985): 222. Example 11: Kofi Agawu, Structural Analysis or Cultural Analysis? Competing Perspectives on the ‘Standard Pattern’ of West African Rhythm, Journal of the American Musicological Society 59, no. 1 (2006): 33. Example 12: R. Anderson Sutton, Traditions of Gamelan Music in Java: Musical Pluralism and Regional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 406. Example 14: Barry Kernfield, What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 205. Example 15: David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (University of California Press, paperback ed., 2000), 72.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Holoman, D. Kern, 1947–, author.

          Writing about music : a style sheet / D. Kern Holoman. — Third edition.

              pages    cm.

          Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-520-28153-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-520-95881-4 (ebook)

          1. Musical criticism—Authorship—Handbooks, manuals, etc.    2. Music—Historiography—Handbooks, manuals, etc.    I. Title.

          ML3797.W75    2014

          808.06—678—dc232014008951

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

      10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

      Contents

      Preface to the Third Edition

      Introduction: First Principles

      I MUSIC TERMINOLOGY

      Titles of Works

      Major and Minor

      Capitalization Schemes

      Proper Names

      Thematic Catalogs of Composers’ Works

      Pitch Names

      Dynamics

      Numbers

      Other

      2 NARRATIVE TEXT

      Getting Started

      Numbers

      Dates

      Money

      Punctuation

      Lowercase and Uppercase

      Foreign Languages

      British English

      Diacritics (Accents)

      Ligatures

      Word Breaks

      Abbreviations

      Block Quotations

      References in Running Text

      Roman and Italic

      Other Typical House Rules

      Format and Design

      Finally . . .

      3 CITATIONS AND CREDITS

      Articles

      Books

      Digital Media

      Sound

      Short Titles

      Review Heads

      Abbreviations

      Principles of Annotation

      Sample Notes and Bibliography

      4 MUSICAL EXAMPLES

      Lyrics

      Scores and Parts

      5 TABLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

      Tables

      Illustrations

      6 PROGRAMS, PROGRAM NOTES, AND CONCERT REVIEWS

      Concerts

      Operas

      Texts and Translations

      Rosters of Personnel

      Program Notes, Liner Notes

      The Concert Listing

      Reviews

      Finally . . .

      7 FILE PREPARATION AND CONTROL

      8 BEST PRACTICES FOR STUDENT WRITERS

      Preliminaries

      Typescript

      Citations, Again

      Vetting

      Submission and Production

      Beware

      Appendix: Problem Words and Sample Style Sheet

      Works Cited

      Preface to the Third Edition

      Alongside the previous editions of Writing about Music came Wikipedia and JSTOR and WorldCat and Zotero—robust, game-changing, everyday utilities all. At IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project/Petrucci Music Library) you can download nearly all the canonic scores of Western classical music. Tracks (or, as iTunes so wrongly puts it, songs) replaced albums, and an electronic device was soon to be found in every palm: Spotify offers ten million tracks to more than twenty-five million subscribers. The collective aspiration became eco and green, soon paperless.

      The Chicago Manual of Style entered its sixteenth edition, changed its color scheme (from the familiar bright orange to near-electric blue) and preferred acronym (to CMOS, which is too bad), and unveiled an impressive online version. CMS, or CMOS, continues to name Writing about Music as the go-to reference work for the matters it treats.

      What has not much changed since the first edition of Writing about Music in 1988 (drawn from a style sheet for contributors to the journal 19th-Century Music) is the scope of the particular issues facing writers about music: title strategies, simultaneous handling of multiple languages, particulars of notation and illustration. But the particulars have dramatically increased, as music scholarship casts its net over every place and period conceivable.

      This third edition means to be timely and pragmatic as to digits and devices and clouds. It extends the principles that work for the classical repertoires into the vast fields of popular and commercial and non-Western musics. Still, we wanted to keep it short and to the point, as before. Hence a brief opening manifesto—First Principles—on the issues at stake, and this summary:

      WHAT’S NEW IN THE THIRD EDITION

      Greatly simplified citation of Internet locators

      Examples from world musics, rock, pop, and cinema

      Expectation of paperless transmission and storage of work product

      Recognition of multiple platforms for writing about music: manuscript (papers and theses), print, web, e-book

      It seems counterproductive to recommend specific products, or even to enumerate their pros and cons (Windows vs. Mac, Finale vs. Sibelius, Microsoft Word vs. OpenOffice, EndNote vs. RefWorks), since these are always changing and the web is full of much richer analysis than could possibly be presented here. Choose a solution carefully, master it, and stay with it until the end of the project.

      I continue to be grateful to the University of California Press for its twenty-five-year commitment to Writing about Music, notably to Mary Francis for promoting and Rose Vekony for helping frame this new edition. I also owe thanks to my copyeditor, Sharron Wood. In addition to the many acknowledgments that have appeared in the previous editions, here I particularly thank Jonathan Elkus, Carol Hess, Stephen Hudson, Barry Kernfeld, Katherine In-Young Lee, Sam Nichols, James North, Henry Spiller, and the reviewers and contributors who helped us plan the third edition. Also, of course, I acknowledge and express deep gratitude to all the authors who see bits and pieces of their work included here as exemplary.

      Introduction

      FIRST PRINCIPLES

      If writing about music is meant to be read and understood by ordinary thinking people, it follows that the running text or narrative should be as uncluttered as possible—moving offsite, one way or another, anything that interrupts our ability to concentrate on the reasoning. This ideal should affect our basic approach to annotation and citation, which must be brief and neat, relying on the immense electronic options at our fingertips. Browsers, search tools, and databases are so intelligent that it is pointless to transcribe long URL addresses into printed texts. Nobody ever retypes those, anyway: one merely cuts and pastes.

      The mechanics of writing, reading, publishing, and preservation have become almost exclusively digital, if not quite paperless, with all the primary exchanges taking place among electronic devices. Hence concepts like page count, manuscript, editing, design, and production are either obsolete or defined quite differently than they once were. The author bears more responsibility than ever for seeing the work satisfactorily through to publication.

      Most of the authoritative resources you may need are now online. These include:

      Grove Music Online, accessible by paid subscription through oxfordmusiconline.com. Full texts of the articles in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn. (2001) have been online since its print publication; also the articles from The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edn. (2002), and now The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edn. (2013), and The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 2nd edn. (2014).

      The Chicago Manual of Style, both 15th and 16th editions (2003, 2010; chicagomanualofstyle.org), likewise a subscription service—though Q&A, where staff members respond to user questions, is free.

      Webster’s. The free online version (m-w.com) is based on Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edn. (2003).

      RISM, the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (rism.info), with easy lookup of the widely used RISM Library Sigla. See 3.41.

      By contrast, the most authoritative sources on music notation remain print-only; see 4.6. The most recent is Elaine Gould, Behind

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