Katy Hamilton

With thanks to all who contacted me in the wake of last week’s rant against digital scores, I have been encouraged to write the piece I threatened to put together on Urtext – what it is, and why we should care more about a score than whether it has this magic word emblazoned on the front cover. But first, I would like to talk about cake.

This weekend, I promised to deliver a banana cake to my parents. Having made a rather successful cake to a very straightforward recipe a little while ago, which was much praised, said cake was specially requested for my weekend visit. So I dug out the recipe and collected all the requisite ingredients from the supermarket, and set about making said cake on Friday evening, in exactly the same way as I had made it last time. Success was assured.

Except something was obviously different. I mean, it wasn’t a disaster or anything. But it wasn’t the cake I had been expecting. And I can tell you about this now, in what I could rather pompously term a self-review of the procedure, and it will stand as the only record of how this particular instantiation of the cake turned out, because in the meantime, my parents and I… ate it. What remains, then, is the recipe and the review. The cake itself was – as all cakes tend to be, and especially when I am anywhere near them – ephemeral.

Imagine the recipe I had was hundreds of years old. Imagine it was handwritten. And that it had been copied out, passed down from generation to generation. In 1885, Great Great Auntie Mabel might have splotched some egg yolk across the ingredients list, and rendered the quantity of flour illegible. When Uncle Cedric, back in the 1950s, tried to write it down from earlier versions, a combination of age-old egg yolk and Cedric’s own terrible handwriting meant that the version which finally reached the millennials was as much an act of deciphering history as actually making a cake.

In its most straightforward and ideal form, an Urtext edition of a piece of music is the correct and accurate version of the score as the composer intended. In a tiny number of cases, such a thing can be achieved with relatively little fuss, assuming that there is a single, flawlessly written and utterly untarnished manuscript in the hand of the composer, ideally a first edition which he/she also supervised, and nothing else. Unfortunately, this is not usually the way things play out. Some composers have terrible handwriting (most famously, Beethoven). How are you supposed to know where the slur ends if the composer’s annotation looks like a drunk slow worm? Do you assume that the piano marking would have gone directly under a particular chord if he’d actually left enough room to put it there? Can you actually tell which way up the thing is supposed to be? (Trust me, this is not always immediately apparent.)

Let’s assume you get past all of that. What if it then turns out that the composer copied down the same piece into an autograph book for someone… but it’s not quite the same? Which version is more right – the most recent version, in the autograph book, or the previous version, which he/she might not have simply written down from memory, as might have been the case when Herr Duke von Baron asked him/her for an autograph? What if there is no surviving manuscript in the composer’s hand, only copies? And if they changed stuff in the printed score, but only in their copy, and never contacted the publisher about it? And if they died before they had the chance to supervise publication…?

Thus far, the difficulty has been (and indeed, most of the difficulties usually are) with the handwritten recipe. There are of course musical equivalents of egg splotches, as well as terrible handwriting and multiple potentially conflicting sources. But there might also be additional complications. Say you find – to return to our cake for a moment – that Uncle Cedric’s dear friend Beryl always used to throw in a pinch of salt, but it’s not on the recipe. Do you add it to the printed list of ingredients? And what about that time Beryl forgot to add the salt, and then said that actually, she rather liked it without salt as well as with? There are composers who are on record as having heard an interpreter play their music very differently from how they themselves would play it, but urging the interpreter to change nothing on the basis of how much they liked what had been done to their creation (above all, Debussy). And they are also composers quite literally on record, often doing something completely other than rendering their compositions in a way that resembles the printed score they have overseen.

Now, at the end of the day, a cake is a cake. It is one instantiation of a recipe which is itself an approximate guide and can be tinkered with to suit the individual cook and consumer. As it happens, a musical score is pretty much the same thing. It’s usually possible to nail down a good percentage of what constitutes a composition, but there are plenty of fuzzy edges as well. Just as we might prefer a particular chef’s version of banana cake, we might also decide that we trust one kind of edition, one editor or editorial policy, more than any other. That’s fine, of course. But so much of the advertising around Urtext presents us with the illusion that this choice is not something we need to make – that there is, in fact, a definitive version of a score… and, equally importantly, that its specific details can be understood without any further reading or understanding. The best editors explain their choices, and the dilemmas they might face. They outline their reasoning behind deciding to write something one way, rather than another, or why they have made suggestions for tempo or dynamic markings. And it’s always worth a read.

The crucial thing is that as performers and scholars, we should be aware of this. Stuff the mindless marketing hype that claims a given edition as ‘the definitive Urtext score’, or something similar. Know that you are making a choice when you pick up a score, and that Mozart was not in fact the sole creator of this production – that is, the physical object you have in your hands. If you take the time check out the hard work that has gone into laying out and printing the document before you, you might discover that you need to look elsewhere to track down details you’d like to know or include. Unlike my banana cake, we care about the individual who made the symphony, string quartet, piano piece, harp concerto that we have before us. We usually know their name, and we want to feel that we have some kind of direct connection with them through the score. And we do! But there are others who have helped, and they deserve acknowledgement, and their input should be understood. Check out the recipe and its contributors before you start baking. That way, you really can have your cake and eat it too.