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On Editing Facsimiles for Performance Author(s): Nicholas Temperley Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Jun.

, 1985), pp. 683-688 Published by: Music Library Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/940851 . Accessed: 08/07/2013 19:13
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ON EDITING FACSIMILES FOR PERFORMANCE


TEMPERLEY BY NICHOLAS

There has been much discussion-recently, for instance, at the MLA meeting in Louisville-of the purposes and problems of facsimile editions of musical sources. These are obviously one of the principal forms of music publication today, and they owe their existence to a merging of two formerly distinct types of reader, the scholar and the musiclover. On one side, the population of those who may wish to examine the sources of a work for accurate information is no longer a mere handful of specialists (who, in any case, generally have to use the originals). It now embraces students and ex-students who have been taught the intellectual value of primary sources. On the other side, a combination of curiosity and sentiment leads many music-lovers to the sources, in the hope that they will somehow thus experience the music in a truer and purer form. Above all, they may be able to perform it from a score that closely resembles the original. This point of view was expressed as long ago as 1974 by Joscelyn Godwin in the magazine Early Music.' He suggested that to enjoy the full aesthetic experience of the past, one should not just play the music in the way it would have been played on original instruments, but should play it from the original notation. Then one could say, for instance, "Ah, this is what it must have been like to be a settecentoVenetian!" He continued: "Living in our time, we do well to holiday in saner ages. Many readers will have noticed that music is an excellent vehicle for such voyages." To enjoy the full savor of romantic time-traveling, one would need to play from the original score itself. For early music this pastime is now restricted to millionaires. But a facsimile is a good second-best. There is the further difficulty, however, that much early music still needs the intervention of an editor to interpret its notation. The time may come one day when enough performers have re-educated themselves in the idiosyncrasies of early music notation (C clefs, continuo realization, ornament signs and the rest) to be able to use unedited facsimiles with confidence. I do not think that we have reached that stage yet for
NicholasTemperley is professor of music at the Universityof Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 'JoscelynGodwin,"Playingfrom original notation,"EarlyMusic2 (1974): 15-19.

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684

MLA Notes, June 1985

the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Even in the early nineteenth century, it is surprising how many problems crop up when an inexperienced performer tries to use a facsimile edition directly. I have been confronting this difficulty in preparing a twenty-volume series of piano music dating from 1766 to 1860.2 My main motive for bringing out the series is to make known a large body of historically important piano music which I have been studying for over thirty years. I want it to be available not merely for scholarly study, but for performance; and I am aware of the existence of a "public"of classically trained pianists who are eager for attractive new material, but who do not find much in contemporary music to satisfy their emotional or intellectual needs. I have a large treasure trove for them. But I am not willing to devote the rest of my life to preparing twenty volumes of fully edited music. Most of this music will never be fully edited. Even the major composers of the repertory, such as Clementi, Field, and Sterndale Bennett, may never be privileged to have all their music enshrined in newly printed collected editions. But the facsimile process makes it possible to bring this little-known, inaccessible music to a fairly wide public-to those, at least, who are users of major libraries. The problem, then, is to find ways of editing the music while still preserving its value as a representation of a primary source. Editing is needed chiefly to correct engraving errors (identified either by comparison with other sources, or by the intrinsic improbability of a reading); to clarify ambiguous notation; to suggest tempo, dynamics, pedaling, or slurs (usually on the basis of parallel passages or other sources); and to resolve ornament signs and other abbreviations. For this series, the London Pianoforte School (LPS), I have been able to carry out much of this editing in a way that still permits the reader to see what is in the original print. An axiom of the procedure is that nothing printed in the original source can be obliterated, except for totally unintelligible passages, which are clarified in the score and explained in Critical Notes. Nor can anything be added unless it is clearly shown to be editorial. If a note is printed on the wrong line, it is left as it is, but the correct note is written on a small section of staff above or below the printed staff. When there is not room for this, a fivepointed black star (clearly recognizable as a modern intrusion) refers to a written-out correction at the foot of the page. Sections of staff, or
2TheLondon Pianoforte School 1766-1860: Clementi,Dussek, Cogan, Cramer,Field, Pinto, Sterndale Bennett, and other Masters of the Pianoforte. Nicholas Temperley, General Editor. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1984- . (Volume 8 is a fully edited collection of the piano works of Philip Cogan, edited by Evelyn Barry. The other 19 volumes are edited by Temperley, and are facsimiles of early printed scores. Volumes 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 17, and 18 are already in print.)

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On Editing Facsimilesfor Performance

685

durational signs alone, are used to reinterpret rhythmic notation (double-dotting, triplets and so on) and to suggest interpretations of ornament signs, though they are not repeated for similar passages later in the piece. Other editorial marks can be safely placed on the music itself-crossed slurs and hairpins, symbols or words in brackets-because these notations are not found in pre-1860 music printing. The illustrations on the following pages from a sonata of John Baptist Cramer show examples of several of these categories. All editorial marks are first inserted by me in red on Copyflo prints, made from a microfilm of the original score. Then they are copied by a trained draftsman on the glossy prints which are to be reproduced in the published edition. The process is quite distinct from the general tidying-up for greater legibility that presumably forms part of all facsimile reprinting: the enhancing of faint marks, and the whiting-out of dirt and of manuscript additions that are without source value. In this series we allow two extensions of such "silent"correction. When a notefor instance, middle C-has been printed in the correct position but without its ledger line, the line is added, without brackets or other indication of editoriality. And when a note is marked to be tied to another of the same pitch in the next system, we permit ourselves to add the completion of the tie uncrossed if it is missing in the original. One other mark has been devised for cases where editorial discussion is needed. A small triangle above a musical passage refers the player to a section titled "Suggestions for Performance." To avoid the added clutter of measure numbers, I refer to measures thus: 19:4:3 means page 19, system 4, measure 3. I believe that these procedures are sufficient to make the music directly performable, leaving the player with few problems of interpretation. But they do not amount to complete editing. For instance, staccato dots and some other marks of articulation are too difficult to show editorially without over-fussy notation; so I decided to leave inconsistent articulation unedited. There are many ways in which late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century English notation differs from that of today; downward stems of half notes were placed to the right of the note head; whole notes were placed in the middle of a measure, and in general notes played simultaneously were not always printed in vertical alignment; accidentals often applied to octave transpositions of the marked note as well as to repetitions of the note itself; notes in the middle of a texture were not always clearly assigned to the right or left hand; an obsolete quarter rest was used; dots were often separated from their parent notes by bar lines; and so on. In a newly engraved critical edition, all such features would have been modernized. I have had to leave them untouched, except in a few cases where the player might

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MLA Notes, June 1985

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On Editing Facsimiles for Performance

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MLA Notes, June 1985

really be misled. Another hazard for the modern pianist is the old English style of fingering, where a cross stands for the thumb and 1, 2, 3, and 4 for the other four fingers. There is nothing to be done about it, but mercifully most pieces other than studies were printed without fingering. The result of this compromise is that the scores in the London Pianoforte School are a bit more difficult to read than modern ones, but with a little practice the player will get accustomed to the differences. And the scholar or student will have a clear and reliable representation of a primary source. Naturally, the method would not work for all musical repertories. For keyboard music I think it could be adapted for most of the Baroque period, but for songs with keyboard accompaniment or violin sonatas one would soon run into the problem of bass realization (soon, that is, in the course of an imaginary journey backward through time from 1800). Accompanied keyboard sonatas were rarely printed in score (hence, I have excluded them from the LPS series), string quartets almost never until after Beethoven's time. One could issue the individual parts with editorial additions, including rehearsal letters or measure numbers, but this would be strictly for performance; any other use would require a scored-up edition. And it seems unlikely that many people would wish to perform orchestral or vocal ensemble music from parts alone with no score available. On the whole, it seems that the method applies best to the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth century, a period for which interest in primary sources is rapidly growing. The notation is not far enough from ours to need large amounts of editorial intervention, and the editions tended increasingly to favor score format. Songs and vocal duets, chamber music in "score and parts" form, partsongs (if in modern clefs), organ, harp, and guitar solos, as well as piano music, all seem to lend themselves to this type of compromise. Appropriately edited, they can be performed directly from facsimiles of primary printed sources which also retain their value for scholarly research.

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