A carnival week blog contribution:
(1) You can tell a good edition of music, dear reader, by its well-planned page turns.
(2) A good edition of music is not a collection of loose sheet music, but is in a binding.
(3) A good edition of music has playable fingering.
(4) Good musicians have good page turners.
Dmitri Shostakovich
‘Why doesn’t Henle have the famous piano trio by Shostakovich?’ or: ‘When will the seventh piano sonata by Prokofiev finally come out?’ Time and again our editorial department receives such questions about our offerings. Continue reading
In 2011 the Brahms researcher Michael Struck made a striking discovery – in a book published already 100 years ago… Continue reading
A blog entry on 24 December – how could it not have Christmas associations? Not even a Henle editor would have it otherwise. Should there really be a blog post on problems in Urtext editions on a date so emotionally charged? That does not seem quite in line to me. Yet, perhaps even in Christmas music undreamt-of Urtext questions might be napping, so that the two could be combined elegantly one with the other? Let’s give it a try in the following. Continue reading
You know George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto and the famous place just before closing, where a percussion instrument introduces the climax of the piece with a loud ‘bang’? You don’t? Then, as an introduction here comes first of all an excerpt from the film ‘An American in Paris’ of 1951, in which Oscar Levant Continue reading
Autograph manuscripts of musical works have an aura all their own that is hard to resist: They fascinate, on the one hand, by portraying a composer’s characteristic handwriting (cf. fig. 1); on the other, they give us immediate access to the composer’s workshop so long as they’re not just fair copies, but working manuscripts with corrections, deletions and additions. Continue reading
Notice: There’s a prize question at the end of this piece. You’re cordially invited to participate!
The music edition of a piano trio comprises in principle, as is generally known, a piano score with two solo parts (violin and cello) enclosed. It is only the pianist who plays from the score consisting of a grand stave for piano in large print with string parts placed above in small print, violin part on top, cello part below. That’s so far nothing new. But what many musicians don’t know is that this particular score format for today’s piano-trio music is an invention (and standardisation) of the 19th century. In the original tradition up to Beethoven’s time composers were neither acquainted with the piano score nor was there a single method of notation. Continue reading
It is part and parcel of the idea of a musical Urtext that the original intentions of the composer be respected also on the level of the instrumental setting. So, coming from Henle publishers will not be any Bach inventions for guitar, Schumann lieder for viola and piano or Chopin’s funeral march for trombone quartet. Continue reading
When you look carefully at our recent publications you’ll also repeatedly notice among them works that we once published and are now putting out in new Urtext editions – indicated explicitly as “revised”. But what is actually meant by revision and why is it necessary? Come to think of it, the old edition was and is after all already supposed to contain the Urtext – or do Urtext editions have an expiry date? Continue reading
How much verbal text can music tolerate?
A serious scholarly book publication can be recognized by the footnotes – and in a way this also applies to musical Urtext editions, because here too it is imperative to base the printed music text on appropriate evidence. Where and how this is done depends though on many parameters – amongst other things, on the question of how much verbal text the music or the practicing musician will put up with. Continue reading →