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Notes 58.1 (2001) 203-204



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Communications


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:

I want to express my disappointment with Nym Cooke's review of the fifteen-volume series, Music of the New American Nation (ed. Karl Kroeger [New York: Garland, 1996-]) in the March 2001 issue of Notes (pp. 707- 17). Although Cooke admits having put "only a small percentage of these many pages to a thorough inspection," most of the review is spent nitpicking the material he has examined. The overall effect is to cast doubt on the quality of the entire series. His most astounding criticism is that "eighty percent of the music . . . may not be particularly worth study or performance." Cooke is a respected psalmodist scholar, his principal work to date being Timothy Swan, Psalmody and Secular Song (Music of the United States of America, 6 [Madison, Wisc.: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, 1997]). Couldn't we at least have had some description of the twenty per cent of the music under review that he does find worthy of consideration? Don't reasons exist, other than esthetic, for having an overview of a huge body of music that is just as important as any other in our heritage, including jazz? And shouldn't we be grateful for having the number of scholarly editions in this field more than quadrupled during the past five years? This writer would welcome the opportunity for Kroeger and the other editors of this impressive series to respond to Cooke's specific criticisms of editorial procedure. Those of us outside the field could learn much from such an interaction.

William Kearns
University of Colorado at Boulder

The author responds:

I am sorry to have distressed Bill Kearns, whom I like and respect, with my review of the Music of the New American Nation series. But I don't see how I could have reviewed the series otherwise. Does Professor Kearns expect me to have checked all, or most, or even more than a sample of the pages of this fifteen-volume edition thoroughly, note against note? And when a relatively small but representative sample of pages has been checked and has been found to be riddled--and I mean riddled--with errors and misrepresentations, is that not enough, indeed, to cast doubt on the quality of the entire series (which is precisely what my review does)? The charge of "nitpicking" strikes me as singularly inappropriate. In any review of this nature, the reviewer is charged with commenting on the quality of musical editing--in itself, of necessity, a tremendously detail-oriented business. So I went about my task in the only appropriate way, which is to compare the edition and its sources, note by note; and I was, frankly, horrified to find that the music of these early American composers is so extensively misrepresented here. The final straw, for me, was discovering that the key word in the title of one of the source tunebooks was consistently misspelled. How can one trust an edition which makes these kinds of errors?

As for my comments about the quality of the music: that was a considered aesthetic judgment made by someone who knows this repertory as well as anyone. Certainly there is much to be discovered by studying many works--both major and minor--from this repertory, or any other. But most of this music is already available for such [End Page 203] studies on the Readex Early American Imprint series (Early American Imprints: 1639-1800 [Reprint, New York: Readex Microprint, 19-]). I was simply questioning the point of publishing--and essentially requiring many libraries to buy--so much music that is clearly mediocre in quality.

Nym Cooke
College of The Holy Cross



To the Editor:

I was disappointed to see that in my article "Bass Parts to an Unknown Purcell Suite at Yale" (Notes, June 2001, pp. 819-33) the illustrations were published from...

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