Abstract: Editing Music in Early Modern Germany. By Susan Lewis Hammond. Aldershot: Ash gate, 2007. [xviii, 265 p. ISBN 978-0-7546-5573-2. 54[pounds sterling].] Someone, somewhere, has probably written an article, a thesis, maybe even a short monograph, on the humble piece of punctuation variously known as the colon, Doppelpunkt, or deux-points. (Interesting to see that, of IAML's three official languages, only English has dignified the colon with a name of its own, rather than just describing what it is.) While fiction writers have not shown themselves to be particularly interested in the colon (at least in book titles, where the rule seems to be the shorter, the better), academic writing is heavily invested in it, and the colon has become all-but-indispensable to dissertations and learned articles, in music as elsewhere, as a device for dividing title from sub-title. Consequently, since a sub-title allows authors room to add some explanation of what their work is about, some of them have felt empowered to use puns (some better than others), Wortspiele and calembours in the main titles of their works, knowing that they can rely on the sub-title to give the reader some idea of what these works are really about. Susan Lewis Hammond has not, in the past, revealed herself as a non-conformist colon-hater: her doctoral dissertation from Princeton (2001) was entitled Collecting Italia abroad: Anthologies of Italian Madrigals in the Print World of Northern Europe, and in 2004 she published an important article in Fontes Artis Musicae on Pierre Phalese as Music Editor: Madrigal Anthology Musica divina (1583). I have dwelt on the colon at some length so far simply because I think that Dr Hammond's new book may be in desperate need of a subtitle, first of all to explain what she means here by editing, and also, perhaps, to explain to some readers what is meant by early modern Germany (here used to mean the period from around 1570-1620, in fact). Many people, when they see the word editing, might be tempted to assume that this is a rather dry book about copy-editing, including the correction of errors in texts. But to make such an assumption would be seriously to underestimate the content of what is frequently a fascinating book. author does devote some space to the role of editors and composers in correcting notation before publication of an edition, or when revising it for a new printing, principally in her informative first chapter, The anthology and the birth of the professional music editor; but it quickly becomes clear that, in the context of this book, can also signify a compiler, a translator, even a poet. One might discern in all these roles the editor as a sort of mediator between a text and its audience, and the central chapters in the book all clearly exemplify the editor as such. core of the book is in the three case studies presented in chapters 2-4, each of which looks at an editor's work from a different angle. first examines the three Gemma musicalis volumes edited by Friedrich Lindner and published in Nuremberg by Katharina Gerlach in 1588, 1589, and 1590. Reflecting the demand from the cosmopolitan and learned citizens of Nuremberg and the surrounding area for Italian music, and especially that of Venice, these three volumes reprint music from collections in the Italian language by the Gabrielis, Giaches de Wert, Luca Marenzio, and Orazio Vecchi. vast majority of this music had been published in Italy only during the 1580s, and was therefore very up to date. advantages of these three anthologies for Nuremberg consumers were firstly, of course, that they were able to purchase Italian products from a local printer or seller, and secondly--and, from the perspective of this book, more importantly--the product selection (the musical gems referred to in the anthologies' titles) had been made for them by someone who knew the local market. …
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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