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  • Communications
  • Michael Kassler

This column provides a forum for responses to the contents of this journal, and for information of interest to readers. The editor reserves the right to publish letters in excerpted form and to edit them for conciseness and clarity.

To the Editor:

In December 1974, Notes (vol. 31, no. 2: 296–7) published my critical review of the 1973 Da Capo Press reprint, with a new introduction by Imogene Horsley, of the 1799 edition of A. F. C. Kollmann's An Essay on Practical Musical Composition. Recent research by Dr. Yo Tomita and myself for a book I have edited (The English Bach Awakening: Knowledge of J. S. Bach and his Music in England, 1750–1830 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004]) has established that this reprint deserves additional criticism. Da Capo Press, it now appears, reprinted the text pages of the 1799 edition of Kollmann's Essay not with the musical examples issued with that edition, but with the examples that were published with the 1812 second edition of Kollmann's Essay.

This mistake may be attributable to Horsley's belief, expressed on p. xxxi of her introduction to the reprint, that the plates of musical examples at the end of the book "are the same" in both editions. But this is false. In his preface to the 1812 edition, Kollmann explicitly stated that "some errata which have been discovered in the plates" have been corrected, and that plate 30 includes a canon not found in the first edition. Of significance to Bach scholars is Kollmann's correction, in the second edition, of some mistakes in the C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier II. Kollmann's 1799 publication of this prelude and its accompanying fugue, as part of his Essay, was the first printing of these compositions anywhere.

Michael Kassler
Northbridge NSW, Australia
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