Historical editions (music)

Historical editions form part of a category of printed music, which generally consists of classical music and opera from a past repertory, where the term can apply to several different types of published music. However, it is principally applied to one of three types of music of this sort:

Up until the 18th century, music performance and distribution centered around current compositions. Even professional musicians rarely were familiar with music written more than a half century before their own time. In the second half of the 18th century, an awakening of interest in the history of music prompted the publication of numerous collections of older music (for example, William Boyce's Cathedral Music, published around 1760-63, and Giovanni Battista Martini's Esemplare, ossia Saggio... di contrappunto, published around 1774-5). Around the same time, the proliferation of pirated editions of music by popular composers (such as Haydn and Mozart) prompted respected music publishers to embark on "oeuvres complettes," intended as uniform editions of the entire musical output of these composers. Unfortunately, many of these early complete works projects were never finished.

In the 19th century, the emergence of romantic hero worship of composers, sometimes described as the "cult of genius," fired the enthusiasm for Complete Works series for important composers. The development of the academic field of musicology also contributed to an interest in more accurate and well-researched editions of musical works. Finally, the rise of Nationalism within music circles influenced the creation of Monumental Editions devoted to geographical regions, such as Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst begun in 1892 and Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich begun in 1894.

In creating a scholarly or critical edition, an editor examines all available versions of the given piece (early musical sketches, manuscript versions, publisher’s proof copies, early printed editions, and so on) and attempts to create an edition that is as close to the composer’s original intentions as possible. Editors use their historical knowledge, detective skills, and musical understanding to choose what one hopes is the most accurate version of the piece. More recent scholarly editions often include footnotes or critical reports describing discrepancies between differing versions, or explaining appropriate performance practice for the time period. In general, editing music is a much more challenging endeavor than editing text-based works of literature, as musical notation can be imprecise, musical handwriting can be difficult to decipher, and first or early printed editions of pieces often contained mistakes.

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