Tuesday, September 29, 2009

I will have a sad on Sunday night...

... because that marks the end of Mariner baseball for 4 to 5 months (I don't remember when it is that they start broadcasting games during spring training). Being a west coast team baseball fan while living on the east coast means alot of late nights listening on mlb.com or using the mlb streaming app on my iPhone. It's been a fun season to be a M's fan (almost erasing the 101 loss horror of last year) with the squad's MacGyver-ish gift for improvising ways to win. Sporting awesome defense, reasonably good pitching and homeopathic levels of situational hitting (at this writing they're 80-76 while having been outscored 675-613 and compiling an amazing 33-20 record in games decided by a single run), it's been an eventful ride with great moments such as the one I had walking from Joe's Pub to the Highline Ballroom a couple of weeks ago listening to Dave Niehaus' call of Ichiro hitting a 2-run walk off homer in the bottom of the ninth to beat Mariano Rivera and the Yanks. I'm also a lucky fan because of the excellent blogs (Baker & Stone at the Seattle Times, Lookout Landing, USS Mariner and Shannon Dreyer) that provide plenty of time-wasting opportunities with provocative, informative, fun and uniformly well-written posts. On that note, I'm so glad to see that Shannon has captured the funniest moment from the radio broadcasts this season, which I heard yesterday while half-assedly studying the Chausson Poeme in a house in the Fire Island Pines during a rainstorm yesterday.

Another memorable moment:

Me and my Dad at an M's/Giants game last Memorial Day weekend


















Dad meeting Mariners manager Don Wakamatsu before the game
























Only 188 days until the Mariners' 2010 season opener!

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Gems from the Library of Congress -- accessible online!

The Library of Congress has made high res scans of some notable items in its collection available online!

From the Fritz Kreisler collection: manuscripts of Brahms' Violin Concerto and the Chausson Poeme

From the Copland collection: first rough sketches of Appalachian Spring & also a continuity draft; sketch/draft of the Clarinet Concerto

These holdings are bit scattered and don't always come up in the search engine as might be expected. I'll do some more digging when I have some free time.

Sadly, it doesn't look like they have the manuscript of Barber's Medea's Dance of Vengeance available online as of yet -- I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon studying it while researching my thesis awhile back; it's one of the more interesting final manuscripts/facsimiles I've seen given the amount of revisions/recompositions that can be observed based on Barber's erasures and cross-outs.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

A pet peeve...

Scores with unbroken barlines from top to bottom without breaks between the ww, brass, string etc. groups (e.g. The reprint of the Chausson "Poeme")

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Visualizing the 5th...

via Sullivan, an elegant graphical presentation of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symhony via color coded (by instrument), animated midi map

Sunday, September 6, 2009

What means this naming that is being called "Urtext Deathmatch"?

Well, I've clearly fallen off the ball/taken my eye off the map since the "launch" of this blog, so now that had a play day that included sleeping in, sunning out by the Christopher Street Pier (admittedly while studying Schubert 8), going to see "The September Issue" (recommended!) and listening to Miguel Batista stink it up pitching (for the Mariners, of course) against the A's, I figured I should at least finish a post that I'd started a few days ago, namely...

Why "Urtext Deathmatch?"

"Urtext" is a German word that translates to "Original Text", and denotes what has become the holy grail of contemporary music publishing for works that are otherwise in the public domain*. The musicologists who are commissioned by the publishing houses to create these editions will locate and examine every available manuscript, engravers copy, corrected proof, conducting/performing score, original orchestral part, letter with instructions to engravers or errata lists, written or oral histories of contemporaries, etc. and try to arrive at a definitive text (hopefully with variants and commentaries) that represents the composer's final version of the work.

There is an unfortunate tendency these days to take the written score/part as sacred object that is to be followed as slavishly and conscientiously as scripture by a fundamentalist or the constitution by a strict constructionist. The urtext designation on an edition tends to amplify this tendency. My attitude toward music notation in general is "take nothing for granted, take nothing at face value". A well-executed** urtext edition is an invaluable resource, but I'm leery of using it as my only reference for studying a work for performance.***

So the initial impetus for this blog and its title is my interest in using multiple editions in studying and the questions that arise. The result of these "Deathmatches" between editions will probably not be posted very often, as this comparative analysis is a bit of a slog and I'm sure writing them up will be time consuming as well. The first one on my plate is the completion of one that I started several years ago using the following sources for Schubert's Unfinished Symphony: the manuscript facsimile, the Brahms edition from the 19th century Breitkopf collected works, the Norton (Chusid) critical, the recent Bretikopf (Gülke) urtext, and the unfortunate Bärenreiter (Dürr).

Why go to this trouble? I believe that close and thorough study of a score is more about finding the questions than the answers -- and conflicting editions help me doubt more and think harder. Only then do I find myself contemplating the deeper issues that guide me to a strongly held point of view and a greater appreciation of the composer's struggle to transmit the fully realized work using the imperfect, inadequate of notational means at our disposal.

* This is an important distinction -- given classical publishers' (especially Barenreiter, Breitkopf and Henle, less so Boosey, which has a catalog of still-under-copyright cash cows such as Puccini's Turandot, Britten's operas, and post-1926 Stravinsky and Bartok) reliance on sales of music that has passed into the public domain, the creation of copyright-protected critical/urtext editions is key to preserving revenue streams that would otherwise be lost to reprint houses such as Dover, Kalmus/Masters/Belwin, and Luck's.
** "Well executed", in my mind, means that the edition provides all the information available from the sources to enable the performer to make an informed decision on the musical text given the range of possible interpretations of the source materials. That means that all editorial additions and adjustments are clearly indicated as such in the text and variants are catalogued as footnotes or endnotes. There are too many cases (e.g. the Bärenreiter Schubert editions) where the need for a particular publication to also function as a performing edition leads to editorial interventions of a type that obscure the range of possible of interpretations. By their nature, true urtext editions should retain a certain amount of ambiguity (unless the composer his/herself serves as the final editor.)
*** Three footnotes in a blog post is two footnotes too many. But the applicable aphorism for this is "A man with two watches never knows what time it is." For performers, it's a good thing not to be too certain at the very beginning of the study process -- it can foreclose too much.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

If you know someone going to China...

...or are going yourself, one of the best bargains to be had is the Mandarin edition of the Bärenreiter Urtext Beethoven Symphonies, edited by Jonathan Del Mar.

Here's the cover of the 9th Symphony:


These are fully authentic publications, with all frontis matter and footnotes translated to Mandarin. Below, the instrumentation list and catalog of sources used to by the editor:


and the first page of the score:




The plates are identical to the European edition; the covers and bindings are of similar quality to the European counterpart. The paper is actually a bit heavier and smoother (to my fingers, at least).

You don't necessarily need to find a music specialty store to find these - I found them at one of the large bookstores in Shanghai.

Why would you want to make your luggage significantly heavier for the return trip?

The cost of the full score of the 9th Symphony via sheetmusicplus.com is $158.95.

The cost of the Chinese edition is.....



RMB 78, which equals $11.42 as of this writing.

You can bring home the entire set of 9 full scores for something less than $50! Leaves plenty of money to buy tea, fans and mooncakes for the person who fed your cat and watered your plants while you were traveling.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Official launch...

I could keep this blog under wraps forever until I thought I'd written all of the types of posts I wanted, but then, what's the point?

So here we go...

As you'll  see below, the topics range from fairly technical/specialized to very mundane; I hope to keep up that mix and to incorporate the types of posts that relate most closely to the title -- an assessment of the newer urtext/critical editions of orchestra rep relative to each other and to the traditional editions. I've been doing this as a part of my performance preparation for some time now but haven't  documented my findings/opinions in a systematic manner. If all goes as planned, this blog should become a decent resource for conductors looking for information about the editions available and whether it's worth spending the money to upgrade from that ratty old Dover or Kalmus reprint they've been using.

That's the plan... but who knows what will happen? Check back from time to time and find out!

Junior wasn't playin...

they really did use the Nutcracker March for Adrian Beltre's first at bat coming back from his injury.