Beethoven’s sketch for his Piano Trio in B-Flat Major, op. 97 (“Archduke Trio”), 1811. Image is from the Music Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center.
In Tuesday’s (3/11) New York Times, Hugh Morris writes, “Editors of contemporary classical music are used to describing what they do through metaphors and comparisons. ‘I suppose you could say I was like a midwife bringing musical children into the world,’ said Sally Cox, a former editor at the publisher Boosey & Hawkes…. Contemporary composition—at least the kind produced through major publishers—[can] be understood as simultaneously the work of a sole composer and a product of group labor. Among those laborers—performers most visibly, but also commissioners, programmers and publishers—there are music editors, people who prepare manuscripts for performance. It’s a role away from the spotlight and rarely explored…. Music editor is the kind of job that only the idiosyncratic structures of classical music can produce. It requires an extremely high aptitude with all aspects of notated music, an understanding of the intricate layers of this literate, visual tradition—not just of notes on a page, but also of how minute cosmetic changes to their appearance might fundamentally alter how those notes sound—and a strong working knowledge of all the strands of music-making that have sought to expand, critique and dismantle notational systems over the past century.” The article quotes several editors, including “Elaine Gould, the former Faber editor whose book ‘Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation’ is an industry staple.”
