Spring Cleaning – new setup guidelines at the Henle house

You ought to underline today’s date in the calendar in red: this is the day that the G. Henle publishing house is introducing new and trailblazing guidelines for the setup of selected titles in the chamber-music repertoire. In the future, enclosed alongside both single parts contained up to now – provided in the Urtext together with fingerings and bowings – will be a third part, the so-called cleaned-up part.

The publishing house is hence following an ever more frequently expressed wish from the music practice side to cater in the case of the complex music-note image for greater optical clarity within the music of late romantic and early modern composers. ‘You cannot imagine how many desperate letters and emails we get on this subject’, explains Dr Wolf-Dieter Seiffert, Managing Director of the G. Henle Verlag. ‘It was high time for a new start.’

So, together with the Swiss graphic artist Uli Russwehr, an innovative setup was developed, throwing the old typographical ballast overboard and setting new standards for printing music in the 21^st century. A look at a sample page of our first cleaned-up edition – Max Reger’s Violin Sonata op. 107 – may be enough to win you over to the outstandingly successful implementation:

(click on image to enlarge)

First feedback from music circles shows an enthusiastic acceptance of the new, cleaned-up part. Thus, the American violin virtuoso Al Priprail promptly twittered: ‘Wonderful idea! Now at first glance I can calmly read all the signs and while playing concentrate totally on the notes.’ Other musicians praised the aesthetic placement of beaming or the meditative impact of 50 lines of music notes on top of each other, exploiting new spiritual dimensions of the beer-heavy portliness of Reger’s music.

Well, a courageous step by the publishing house, sure to encounter lots of feedback. Seiffert, however, is already peering into the future: ‘The facsimile editions are the next step in line. Or, are you able to tell in a Beethoven autograph an accidental from an inkblot? Here there’s still lots to clean up.’ So, don’t you wonder when in the near future you’ll find in our catalogue next to the Diabelli Variations also the DVaaabeiiiillnorst….