Organized by the AMS Committee on the Publication of American Music (COPAM).
The Committee on the Publication of American Music (COPAM) is pleased to present a workshop comprising two complementary sessions on the theory and practice of preparing critical editions. These two sessions serve as an exciting opportunity to galvanize discussion about the role of critical editions in contemporary musicology. In a period where the field of musicology continues to see a range of new approaches to music, in areas extending from historiography and political economy to hermeneutics and musical analysis, critical editions provide a compelling lens for approaching a range of questions about music and its documentation: How might new critical editions expand the range of repertories that are represented in the literature, and how do editors set about documenting these repertories? What tools are critical for the training of critical editors, and how might these keep pace with broader changes in our understanding of music? How does the publication of critical editions unfold in practice?
This second of our two sessions is a workshop that enables participants to apply critical editorial methods in dedicated practical sessions. After a general overview, our speakers will serve as clinicians, presenting sources containing conflicts and discrepancies for participants to discuss possible solutions, providing advice on participants’ projects, and fielding questions about fundamentals and approaches to creating critical editions of music from a variety of sources. After these case studies, our speakers will close out the last fifteen minutes of the workshop with reflections and concluding thoughts. Our panel of clinicians includes Amy Stillman, editor of MUSA’s Hawaiian Songs: Ancient and Modern; Patrick Warfield, editor of the MUSA edition Sousa: Six Marches; Alexander Dean, managing editor of A-R Editions’ Recent Researches in Music; and Pamela Whitcomb, President and Director of Music Publications at A-R Editions.