This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.

At every step along the way in this class, I feel like I find out more about just how much I don’t know.

We’ve learned about complexities in the fields of writing, reading, publishing, and copywriting. This week we engaged with twelve different sources on the topic of printing works.

Perhaps because my mom’s family managed a printing press business in my home town, this subject is quite interesting to me. My mom and uncle would spend their time in the summers working in the shop (my uncle doing customer service in the front; my solving mechanical problems in the back). They would set and press the San Marcos daily record, other local publications, as well as private invitations and stationary.

I’ve grown up hearing words like ‘movable type” at “facsimile,” but I didn’t quite have a handle on the details until now.

Starting with the clear definitions presented in Grove Music Online helped me to get a footing. From their paragraph long definitions of publishing terms, I gleaned these concise descriptions…

– autograph: written by the hand of someone (even scribe/copysist)
– holograph: written in the hand of the author or composer (original work?)
– sources: the handwritten documents that lie behind the printed form in which the music circulates
– editions, historical: “historical edition” is music publication devoted to a past repertory (most useful for study of original versions of past music, i.e. scholarly or critical evaluation. These come from critical evaluation of primary sources which is different from ‘practical or performance edition’)
– urtext: the earliest version of the text of any composition
– facsimile: recreate appearance of an original handwritten manuscript or printed edition

Beyond the definitions, Grove also discussed historical influences, changes and practice, and warnings for modern researchers. One theme that I picked up on throughout, is that there really is no sense of certainty when it comes to music publishing. Whether reproducing a composers original work via picture, or looking at a collection of sources to determine the what the composer intended, the publisher is never able to know if what they are producing is what the composer intended.

This sentiment is echoed in Annette Oppermann’s article, “What’s the Shelf Life of Urtext? Revising at Henle Publishers.” In the last paragraph, Opperman proposes Henle Verlag’s goal of presenting the “composer’s ultimate version,” consider the most up-to-date research. It is for this reason that Henle Verlag continues to release revisions of their publications as new discoveries are made, and Opperman suggests that all musicians should consider the music they play with Henle Verlag’s example of questioning and critical decision making in mind.

Just beginning to realize the work that went into publishing, as illuminated in the videos “The art of making a book: Setting type, printing, & binding by hand” and “Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film,” it is no surprise to me that mistakes were made in the history of music at every juncture of production.

In many cases, composers make mistakes that publishers are left to sort out. Publishers make mistakes that setters and printers are left to sort out. Setters and printers were confined by the limitations of the technology they were working with. And all is predicated on the fact that a composer even believed that their work on a composition was complete or communicated as well as possible (which doesn’t really seem to be the case Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5).

To navigate these complexities, of course, musicians must take responsibility for understanding the process of publication and common pitfalls. It is not good enough to just buy the Henle edition and call it a day (which I have certainly been guilty of doing). I’m grateful now to have a clearer idea of the inner workings of the publishing world, and to be armed with a plethora of online and printed sources (via the IC library) that will help me get a closer look at what a composer actually intended with their composition.