A-R Editions’ Online Music Anthology (review)

A-R Editions’ Online Music Anthology is a Web-based compilation of scores edited and presented for the express purpose of providing source texts for courses in music history.¹³ It is, by no means, a substitute for purchases of individual scores in the music library, but rather a substitute for anthology purchases and a supplement to monument collections. The database currently contains 425 vocal and instrumental works—over 3,000 pages—including titles from the print versions of A-R’s Recent Researches series and some American Institute of Musicology series, as well as additional titles in similar veins.¹⁴ With a recent move to institutional subscriptions, A-R has geared this resource toward a wider audience and given libraries an opportunity to combat problems of textbook affordability and inflexibility for music students.

The Anthology currently contains selected pieces of music from antiquity through the romantic era, with the greatest emphasis on the common practice period. Plans are afoot to add almost 250 additional 18^th- and 19^th-century works in the near future, and A-R has begun discussing the inclusion of 20^th-century titles as well. Pieces are selected with an eye toward replacing print anthologies traditionally used for music survey courses. Feedback from musicologists indicates that this is a practical strategy thus far; a 2010 review of the Anthology in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy presents Dane Heuchemer’s cogent assessment of the benefits and limitations of using the Anthology in teaching music history, and includes a positive assessment of the correlation between the scores currently used in the review author’s survey on medieval and Renaissance music and the contents of the Anthology.¹⁵ The collection has grown since this assessment, so one would expect even higher correlation today.

Each piece in the collection is presented as new editions with modern clefs while editorial changes such as transpositions are noted. Many of these pieces have previously appeared in print versions of A-R series, and while information about the series is on the bottom of each score’s first page (when relevant), this information is not available when browsing the database, nor is this searchable information. To music librarians and musicologists, the A-R brand is a familiar and trusted one that has depended on known scholars to serve as editors. Others visiting the site might not find the publisher as familiar, but they can see who edited each piece on the first page of the score. As with the series title, this information could be more helpful if it were included in the metadata about each piece and searchable.

Compositions included in the Anthology represent a wide variety of genres that are indexed with impressive granularity. Some works are presented in their entirety while many larger works are represented only by selections. For instance, one may find all of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony (as four separate files, one for each movement) but only the first and second movements of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. Likewise, there are few complete operas included; rather, most operas here are represented by selections that range from arias and scenes to full acts. Smaller works are more likely to be included in their entirety, and excerpts are chosen with care.

The comprehensiveness—or lack thereof—of the database’s coverage is a reflection of the purpose of this source, and it is an important distinction that should be emphasized when marketing the Anthology to patrons. As with A-R’s print series, coverage is not exhaustive by composer or genre but rather representative, with the goal of presenting a sampling of several composers’ works over time. While this approach is similar to that of traditional monuments of music and study anthologies in the print environment, moving away from the “wrapper” of the individual volumes...