58. Leaving traces

One of our dogs, Lorraine, is a hound mix of some sort.  She has an incredible nose.  (Actually, the ears and jowls are pretty impressive, too.)  Her favorite thing on a walk is to find a piece of pizza that someone has left on the ground—which occurs more often than you might think.  But her second favorite thing is just follow some new scent that wasn’t there the last time we walked by.  She loves it.

SOURCE:  my photographs of Lorraine out for a walk/sniff on December 28, 2025.  No pizza found, alas.

Even with a short list of unfinished drafts for other posts, today’s post occurred to me because of a number of thing coalescing in my reading in the last few weeks.  Some of the books were Christmas presents, some were in piles of things to read when I had time, and others for ongoing research.  Let me start with a few excerpts that struck me:

Maria Caraci Vela [trans. Elizabeth MacDonald]:  “Copying, therefore, manuscript or printed, and to a large degree also of computerised type, is never a completely mechanical act: the text is assimilated by the reader and copyist—who lives and acts within precise horizons and cultural and historical conditioning—in an individual manner, and its reproduction necessarily passes through a filter that includes the risk of deviations from the model, whether they are voluntary or involuntary, mechanical or due to reflection, intrinsic in any case to the very act of transmission” (p. 18).  “Every witness [source] is a physical individual and a historical reality, which documents a precise moment in the life of a text.  There may of course be a witness that definitely transmits the wishes of the author.  But this does not mean that the philologist should not in any case study other witnesses: because, as has already been said, that witness does not exhaust all point of interest or the field of investigation in musical philology, as it is important to evaluate both whatever may have preceded him (the history of the creative process), and whatever came after (further author’s corrections; the history of tradition and the reception given to the musical text)” (p. 25).

[Name withheld to shield a naïve academic, in a pre-publication review included in the eventually printed volume]:  “He does not quote sources for his findings, for he is himself an unimpeachable source for anything you might care to know about a wide range of yuletide musical gems, spanning centuries and encompassing the globe.”

Yo Tomita:  “In a modern critical edition it is standard practice to discuss any potentially controversial decisions in relation to the musical text in the form of a commentary, usually found at the back of the volume.  Yet, when it comes to issues that are generally considered outside the realm of the main musical text, such as the style of movement headings, score layout, beaming, the distribution of text between the left and right hands in the case of keyboard works, and so on, editors tend to mention very little or nothing at all” (p. 13).

And it came to pass that as I was walking Lorraine the other day, I started wondering if while she is keenly aware of the traces left by others she gives any thought to the traces she leaves behind for the next scent hound.  Sure, dogs may sometimes intentionally mark territory, but even as they proceed along their merry way they are leaving a scent trail behind at all times.  As are we all.

I remember being taught that we cite sources just to give credit it where it is due, but also that those who follow us can replicate our work and see if they agree with our conclusions.  I have noticed that my own students seem to regard citations as a sign of weakness (equivalent to a confession that I didn’t come up with all of this myself), while I try to show them that they are actually a sign of strength and should be a source of pride (Look at all the work I did on this!).  Scholarship is joining an ongoing conversation, and doing that productively requires a good bit of listening to what others are saying before venturing in yourself.

I understand Tomita’s frustration:  sometimes, in the interest of tidy new editions, all manner of clues are expunged from the text.  I have been guilty in acceding to house style guides that tacitly regularize all manner of things that seem (as Tomita puts it) “outside of the main musical text.”  It can be difficult in such instances to know what the composer really wrote on the page—and even in instances where an editor makes a point to retain some notational aspect as musical significant, the user may still be at a loss.  Why this now?  As an example, in Charles Villiers Stanford’s orchestral song cycle Songs of the Fleet, the third movement—“The Middle Watch”—opens with just octaves in the strings, together with the downbeat given in the timpani.  It is in a slow 6/4 meter.  This is Stanford’s notation in both of his autographs—the choral/piano score (which he notated first):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph vocal score (Royal College of Music MS 4158a), f. [7r].

and the full orchestral score (although I have cropped the wind parts from this image):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph full score (Royal College of Music MS 4158), f. [18v]

In this instance, for the new edition I felt it would be wrong to regularize the tied dotted half-notes as dotted whole-notes already in b. 1.  Yes, in a sense they are equivalent (each filling a whole bar), but I think they connote different things.  Perhaps perversely, the tied dotted half-notes suggest to me a longer sound than a dotted whole-note, as using the tie suggests to me that the break between the end of the held note and the attack of the next should be a shorter.  Stanford soon switches to using dotted whole-notes—easier to write, certainly.  In fact, it is because it would be easier to write—as a shorthand—that I do not think he is suggesting that they require a different interpretation.  Rather, it suggests I’ve shown you what I mean, now you keep doing that.  He doesn’t bother to indicate ‘simile’ because it seems obvious.

That said, I contend that it would have been wrong of me to change all his dotted whole-notes into tied dotted half-notes—that is, to regularize it in a way that so often is a hallmark of editions, by spelling out what the editor thinks the composer meant.  But it is worth leaving editorial traces, and so it was important to include a note explaining what I was up to, a scent for interested hounds to follow:

SOURCE: cropped scan from the critical notes of our edition (A-R Editions, 2019), p. 213. 

“Inconsistent thereafter” covers a lot.  It could be regarded as carelessness on the part of the composer.  If the matter had been really important to me, I should have documented every instance of the tied dotted whole-notes in the two Stanford autographs.  Moreover, I shied away from stating outright my musical reasons for wanting to retain Stanford’s idiosyncratic notation for those first two bars, as maybe there would come others after me who would recognize a different and greater significance in it.  I think it is important, though, in such situations, for the user to know to what degree what they are seeing reflects the composer's notation, and to what degree that has been altered.  (For an example where I think the standardization goes a good deal too far, see my post about the HHA edition Handel’s Musick for the Royal Fireworks.)

I give my Stanford example as one in which we see the composer leaving one sort of trace and the editor another, but my point is that we are all leaving traces all the time.  An example comes to mind from Malcolm Bilson’s Knowing the Score lecture, which includes an anecdote of a pianist coming to him with Beethoven's op. 111 using an edition in which the lower-staff leap (in octaves) of the treacherous opening diminished seventh is re-notated to be use both hands, thus bypassing the danger.  As Bilson remarks, this student “doesn’t even know what Beethoven wrote!”

This issue—not knowing what a composer wrote—is exceedingly common.  That is just the state of things.  (Q.  What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?  A.  I don’t know and I don’t care.)

I see that the edition to which he is referring—Leo Weiner’s 1959 edition for Editio Musica Budapest—is not yet accessible via the IMSLP, and maybe that is just as well.  But Weiner was a highly educated musician, and I’m sure he did not make this alteration without considering it carefully.  (The same cannot be said of a lot of the stuff uploaded to the IMSLP:  entirely new files, in which some manuscript or older edition has been re-set by someone with access to musical notation software.  Sometimes these are done pretty well; sometimes they are abysmal—but maybe that should be the subject of another post someday—again an issue of the worst of amateurism).  Still, one of the traces Weiner’s edition leaves behind inevitably betrays at least a different understanding of the music than Bilson argues is manifest in the original notation.  And, as James Grier memorably puts it, “Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as he editor” (p. 136).

I thought about Bilson’s indignation a few months ago when I was filling-in for the organist at a local church.  One of the communion hymns was a new one to me: “He’ll understand, and say ‘well done’.”  It is number 190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II:  An African-American Hymnal (1993), a publication of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, overseen by the renowned gospel music scholar Horace Clarence Boyer (1935-2009).  Boyer knew what he was doing, and if I second guess him now, it is because it may reveal the different sorts of traces left by him as editor and me as user.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

The chord that I have indicated is (to my mind) misspelled, or rather contains a misspelt note.  I would argue that bass note should really be a b-double-flat, a chromatic upper neighbor to the a-flat which follows.  We might hear that just as the bass line skipping up while  the rest of the chord is sustained, or specifically as a familiar “French augmented 6th” sonority in this case borrowed from a d-flat major tonality that never itself actually gets stated as such.  The a-natural just doesn't register with me:  I can’t make sense of it, or at least couldn’t make sense of it as I sight-read the example verse after verse.  It actually was even harder in the refrain, where the same chord progression occurs, but this time the cautionary flat sign for the ensuing a-flat is missing.  That really threw me.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

In such a context, I would ordinarily expect an a-natural to resolve upwards, and a b-double-flat downwards.  The a-natural seemed to me non-sensical.  But the point is the I would ordinarily expect.  It is the theory training that has messed up my ability to read the music as it is.  I will grant, in the abstract, that an a-natural is much easier to imagine than a b-double-flat.  But this is not in the abstract:  it is in context.  And in context, the way I have been taught has made it harder to read as notated, even though the a-natural is a “simpler” concept.  (I used this in class to illustrate to some beginner theory students that as they acquire theoretical knowledge and think more in terms of theoretical concepts, they may find that they lose facility at things they can already do now.  This example demonstrates one way that has happened to me.)

I don’t know what the back-story of this version of this hymn is—my hound nose isn’t as good as Lorraine’s—but it would seem that in the production of the Lift Every Voice and Sing II Boyer and the others of his editorial team either passively let the a-natural stand from whatever source-text they were working from, or actively changed b-double-flats to a-naturals to appear—I’m guessing—more user-friendly to the church musician.  The attribution for this arrangement is to Boyer himself, and I haven’t found this harmonization anywhere else.  (Hymnary.org cites seventy appearances of the tune in the hymnals and songbooks in their database; the melody in some of those other instances is remarkably varied in a lot of ways, and I was gratified to find in another harmonization two true c-flats rather than b-naturals.)  The chosen spelling of the note makes it easier for some, harder for others.  I suppose I sniff out here some general sense of the intended end-user, and that user wasn't expected to put up with b-double-flats.  And yet, not quite:  I only have to turn the page to no. 191 (also in e-flat major) to find b-double-flats notated.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  The trail has gone cold.

And thus another excerpt which has been on my mind for several months:

John Jowett:  “Text is puzzling, Protean, and capable of shifting beyond reach at the very point where we try to grasp it.  In that awareness lies the fascination of the subject” (p. 6).

I find myself thinking of both the textual trails that lead to musical editions and the trails that those editions leave behind—for better or worse.  What I have learned most as I have written this blog over almost ten years is that the textual situation continually surprises me.  I know what Jowett means.  So very often when I go to check a point in whatever early sources are accessible to me, there is something unexpected—and that something that was already fascinating to me becomes increasingly more absorbing.  Just in time for Christmas 2024, Bärenreiter put out a facsimile of the autograph manuscript of Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava.  As soon as my copy arrived, I turned to a magical moment—my favorite use of the triangle in the whole of the orchestral repertoire (or, more accurately, the bit of it that I know).  It happens at b. 36, the moment presumably representing the confluence of the sources of the river that have been so evocatively depicted in first 35 bars.  But what I found surprised me:

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of Bedrich Smetana: Vltava [autograph score: Národní muzeum - Muzeum Bedřicha Smetany inv. č. S 271/1250] (Bärenreiter Facsimile, 2024), p. 4

If that is hard to make out in that image, I have uploaded a larger scan of the full page here.  But what is important to note is that the triangle part is not on the staves, but is added at the bottom of the page.  Those little dots are three notes (the downbeats of bb. 36, 38, and 40) and rests in between.  If you check the full page, you will see that it is ruled with 24 staves.  The first three are blank; then nine are used for the first system (bb. 30-34); then there is a blank staff to separate the systems; and the remaining nine are used for the last system (bb. 35-41).  This means that there was space for Smetana to include the triangle on a staff if he had planned to use it here.  (The triangle is given its own staff on the first page of the score, where the full instrumentation is spelled out; although the timpani has its standard placement in the middle of the page, Smetana puts the rest of the percussion at the bottom of the system:  triangle on stave 23; cymbals and bass drum on stave 24.  Is this a trace of an afterthought?  The barlines on p. 1 seem to be drawn without a break to the bottom staff, so perhaps not.)  The next page comprises bb. 42-46; the triangle does not play, and it is not allotted a staff.  Only on the next page do we find the triangle given its own staff (23), and with music to play—but even then it is impossible to know whether it was added as he scored that page or added later.  The triangle never again appears in the lower margin of the page, but it is also never included in a general system bracket unambiguously made in preparing a page of the score (even on p. 1).  

What I sniff out of all of this is that that magical moment in b. 36 is sheer inspiration, and inspiration that apparently caught Smetana off guard, as he hadn’t made room for it.  And—most curiously—he adds a performance instruction for that first triangle note:  

“p elegante”

I have my doubts on whether anyone would know what to do with this instruction.  (I can almost hear a conductor in rehearsal: Percussionist, can you ‘ding’ more elegantly, please, as instructed?)  In b. 48 he adds another baffling triangle instruction:

“p zvonkovitě”

The Czech here, I am informed, means "bell-like" or "reminiscent of bells."  The new Bärenreiter critical edition gives “quasi campanella.”  Again, I would be at a loss.  (Percussionist, can we have a bit more ‘dong’ in that ‘ding’?)  Does the player need to switch to another triangle?  Clearly, Smetana sensed an expressive potential in the triangle that few others ever have.  And if I think he overdoes the triangle a bit in Vltava a bit, that first “ding” still gets me every time.

In recent months I have been following Marc Shepherd’s substack posts about editorial issues in Gilbert & Sullivan, particularly their 1875 one-act Trial By Jury.  Shepherd is concerned with getting practical and authoritative texts affordably into the hands of companies producing these shows.  Such companies often work on a shoestring budget, and so have tended to use whatever free performing materials they could access, despite the hosts of textual problems such materials contain, rather than shell out any money on more reliable texts.  I commend Shepherd for taking it upon himself to improve the available performing texts, and for taking the editorial task so seriously.  I also appreciate the transparency of these substack posts—the traces are left everywhere for anyone interested.  Not only can we follow Shepherd’s traces in the decision making (and vis-à-vis other editions of the work), but Sullivan’s traces in the compositional process.  Sullivan’s various short-hand notations and labor-saving devices (ditto passages, colla parte doublings...) left all manner of irreconcilable differences, including a surprising note for Oboe II, even when Sullivan never once had a second oboe in his comic operas.  Although Shepherd’s task is to solve these problems, he goes one better by calling attention to them.  Knowledge of a textual curiosity in one work may well illuminate a real problem in another, and the more minds aware of it the better.  (An example I have mentioned before in this blog of how such wider knowledge is required to answer even tiny puzzles is Jonathan Del Mar’s insight into Beethoven's use of the clef-method of transposition, leading Beethoven to write (for example) an umambiguous c-natural when he just as unamibuously meant c-sharp).

Sometimes we have enough of the materials to verify that what seems odd in a source is actually a trace of something that was odd.  For example, looking through some printed parts for Charles Lecocq’s charming 1872 opera La Fille de Madame Angot, I was puzzled to see three bars of rest notated individually rather than with an extended rest (as elsewhere in the part), and—even more suspicious—an extraneous pp mark:

SOURCE: cropped marked-up scan from 1873 flute/piccolo part on the IMSLP (#876459), p. 15.

Surely there was a story here!  And indeed, the autograph full score revealed that the piccolo had had a pp melody there that had been since deleted in blue pencil.  

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from autograph full score on Gallica (ark:/12148/bpt6k8559382), p. 113 (f. 52r).

So (my hound nose tells me) the part was prepared before the deletion, but then altered; but as it had been laid out with three bars there, it was easier to put in whole rests in each bar than to make it a three-bar extended rest.  (If you don’t know this work, by the way, this brief promo video for a marvelous new recording is a great introduction.)

I try to get my students to look for such curiosities in whatever we are studying.  For example, we look at the Bach concerto for two keyboard, BWV 1060, asking the question if this was indeed originally written for different solo instruments, what traces can we find to suggest what they were?  The solo lines are so markedly different each other (at least judging by the right hand parts of the solo keyboards) that they do not seem to have been both of the same instrument.  It seems conventionally accepted that it was originally violin and oboe, which certainly seems very reasonable to me—but I do want them to look at the evidence (such as it is) and see what they would make of it.

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from BG edition of BWV 1060, Bd. 21.2 (IMSLP # 849611), p. 29 

I quoted one line of James Grier’s The Critical Editing of Music above.  I should give him a little more space, and I wholly endorse his sentiment on the traces left by an edition, a starting point rather than a finish line:

“Critical editions should generate critical users.  The advantage a critical edition offers its users is guidance from a scholar who has devoted a considerable amount of time, energy, and imagination to the problems of the piece and whose opinion is therefore worth considering.  This is not to say that users need not do any thinking for themselves, nor that they must agree with the editor in every particular.  But a critical attitude should stimulate a critical response, of which one possible manifestation is a competing edition.  Many of these ambiguous issues can never be resolved definitively, either because source materials have perished or because ambiguities were present from the original compositional conception of the work.  Therefore no edition is definitive, and, perhaps more important, the truth is simply not ascertainable....  The greatest works of music, as of literature, have attracted and will continue to attract the attentions of editors whose approach varies considerably, and so it is inevitable that several editions of a given piece might exist, each different in many aspects.  If such is the case, in variably the truth will fall somewhere in between the competing editions, and the student of the work is better served by consulting all editions or as many as is practicable.  In this way the users themselves can draw conclusions about the whereabouts to the truth” (p. 181f.).

Indeed, for this textual hound, edited texts become as absorbing as the the source(s) to which they point.

SOURCE:  my picture of Lorraine displaying her wingspan (October 2025)