The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice (review)

The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice. By James Grier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. [xiv, 267 p. ISBN 0-521-55863-8. $20.95 (pbk.).]

By any standard, the publication of this book has been a cause for celebration; for those of us who had long hoped for a musical counterpart to Jerome J. McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), it is a long-awaited reward. Inspired by McGann's powerful demonstration of the socialized nature of the creation and reception of literature, Grier's book is shaped by the premise that musical texts, perhaps even more than literary ones, are susceptible to interpretation as culturally mediated readings. Building on this observation and backing up his argument with a wide range of music examples, Grier weaves a series of penetrating insights on the musical condition per se into a general philosophical and practical framework for music editing.

Grier announces his mission at the start of the preface. He aims, he says, "to challenge editors to recognize the degree to which critical interpretation and editing are inseparable" (p. xiii). Critical engagement begins already, he notes, with the choice of editorial project. The degree of editorial concern with a repertory is proportional to that repertory's perceived importance to the self-image of the society in question. Hence, for example, the editorial emphasis literary scholars place on Shakespeare and the importance in the history of modern music editing of the Bach-Gesellschaft edition of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach (Werke, ed. Bach-Gesellschaft [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1851-99]). The collected editions of the works of Bach, Mozart, and other central figures have, Grier notes, been powerfully instrumental in affirming the works of those composers as the cornerstones of the "canon" of Western high-art music. They have also provided models for editions of "lesser" composers' works, through which the greater structure of that canon has been built.

But society's changing priorities have brought changing aesthetic attitudes to the canon, and thus to its editing. For example, one might view the "objectifying" tendencies of postwar editions and the commercial rise of the urtext as symptoms of the objectifying stance of high modernism. As Grier observes, "all editors exist in their own historical context, which directly affects the attitude they take in approaching any editorial project" (p. 20); and on the most microcosmic level, "editors have always shaped the texts of their editions to conform to their personal interpretative conception of the work" (p. 6). Each editor will prioritize different things differently, and each individual project will engender different solutions.

Editorial projects, then, like the music they deal with, are subject to external influences: historical priorities, envisaged users, commercial interests, scholarly precepts, or pure personal caprice. Grier's aim--an ambitious one--is to subsume all of these variables into "a generalized theoretical framework for editing, within which each editor can develop a particular methodology for the project at hand" (p. 5). For music, of course, there is an important variable not present in literature (with the obvious exception of drama): performance. "The piece," as Grier says, "resides equally in the score and in the performing conventions that govern its interpretation at any particular historical moment" (p. 22).

Implicit in notation is a series of performance options: variables in notes, rhythms, speeds, instrumentation, and so on, that are part of the unnotated--and often unnotatable--conventions current in the time and milieu of a piece's composition and use. These "hidden" aspects of a piece define the latitude in performance expected in any of its parameters. They are also, as Grier warns, subject to change, such that the same notational symbols may not carry the same significance at different times, or even in different places at the same time. Thus it is incumbent on the editor--and increasingly so with increasingly remote repertories--to inform those who use the edited score...