by Brian Jeffery
A professional in any field is, of course, normally someone who has attended a university or other institution and has studied the subject there usually for some years, has then taken the examinations at the end of the course, and having passed them will then have the requisite professional qualifications in that field which will entitle them to offer their services as a professional to the public, charging a fee or a salary for those services.
A professional accountant, for example, will have studied accountancy at an institution and will have obtained professional qualifications in accountancy. A professional lawyer will have gone to law school, studied there and obtained a degree in law.
It’s no different with editors. The normal requirement for an editor to be described and qualified as a professional is not just a university degree in scholarship but first of all a basic undergraduate university degree in a scholarly field and then also a postgraduate university degree which is normally a doctorate.
Don’t take my word for it. Have a look at the 694-page Handbook of Stemmatology of 2020 (it is available free on the internet). Stemmatology in this context is a branch of ecdotics which is editions theory, that is to say the theory of making editions. In that Handbook you will see 37 contributors in the field of editing texts or music who are all professionals in editing. And have a look at the Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship of 2013 which has sixteen contributors, all of them professionals in the field of editing, thus giving a total of 53 professionals in the field of editing. At the end of the Handbook and on page x of the Companion you will see the short biographies of those 53 professionals in the field of editing and you will see that all of them are either university professors or work in research institutes and all of them are at post-doctoral level. So you can see that professional editing, whether it is of texts or music, is a university postgraduate subject.
Most of those 53 people whom I mentioned work on classical, Biblical, or modern texts, but music is also included. The Handbook of stemmatology, for example, has a chapter on stemmatology in musical scholarship written by Cristina Urchueguía who teaches at the University of Berne and who has a particular connection to guitar in that she was the supervisor of the thesis of Israel Salvador Vazquez Zerecero on the eighteenth century guitarist Vargas y Guzmán, which shows that what I’m talking about here applies to music just as much as it does to texts.
The standard work on textual scholarship in general including music, which is a postgraduate university subject and which at its highest level includes making editions, is the 561-page Textual scholarship, an Introduction by the late D.C. Greetham, of 1992 and 1994. Greetham and I overlapped at Oxford, but I didn’t meet him then. Greetham taught at the Graduate Center of CUNY (City University New York). Elsewhere (in a foreword which he wrote to a 1999 edition of Jerome J. McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, on its page ix) he makes it clear that his students are graduates, “a group of serious young doctoral students”, that is to say, people who already hold a university undergraduate degree and who are now advancing in postgraduate studies. He also makes it clear that music is included, for example on his pages 2, 3, 5, 12, etc., and especially on his pages 356-7.
Greetham writes on his pages 4 and 5 about the manifold subjects that prospective editors need to master before venturing to make an edition, and it is a long list indeed of which here are some: “they must have developed a system for checking that they have access to all the appropriate documents … they must have a methodology for listing and adequately describing these documents … they must be able to establish the relative priority and probable descent of the documents … they must have a rationale for types and levels of emendation … they must know which parts of their texts need to be annotated for the reader … All of this is, of course, in addition to the obvious historical, biographical, literary or other research which must be undertaken before an edition can even be contemplated”.
So Greetham makes it clear that prospective editors need to master a long list of subjects “before an edition can even be contemplated” and he states that his book will “take the student through the various stages that a textual scholar must master before editing can begin in earnest”. With these requirements, and with the necessity for an editor also to have a mastery of editions theory and practice as they stand today, it’s pretty clear that for someone to claim to be a professional editor they need to have first a university undergraduate degree in a scholarly field and then professional training and professional qualifications in editions theory and practice at university postgraduate level. And because Greetham also makes it clear that textual scholarship applies to music as well as to literary studies, we can see that this list of his applies to people making editions of music as well as to those making editions of literary texts.
I here mention my own position. I did advanced training in postgraduate work on textual scholarship, paradoxically, in a “gap-year” before I went up to Oxford to be an undergraduate. During that gap-year I studied, handled, and transcribed original manuscripts in Canterbury Cathedral Library, supervised by the cathedral librarian William Urry who was later a Fellow of All Souls and Reader in Medieval Latin Palaeography in the University of Oxford. Then at Oxford I took a First Class degree (which for my American readers is the equivalent of a summa cum laude from Harvard). Then I put that training and those qualifications into practice with my publications.
Does it matter if an editor is not professional? That is to say, if they don’t have that undergraduate university degree and then the postgraduate doctorate? Well, the answer is pretty simple: if you haven’t studied a subject and got a qualification in it then it is difficult to see how you can know how to do it. In England, for example, the term “accountant” is not protected; that is to say that absolutely anyone can legally call themselves an accountant and offer their services to the public for a fee, even if they have no qualifications in accountancy. But if they haven’t studied accountancy then it is hard to see how they can know, for example, about the many tax regulations and allowances that exist in the UK and which they will need to know about if they practise accountancy in the UK for the public and for a fee. Here is an article about the risks that you take if you employ an unqualified accountant in the UK (start at the heading “You get what you pay for”).
It’s the same with editing.
Specifically about musicians who try to make music editions without first having studied the making of editions in general, the late musicologist Jacques Chailley wrote in his Précis de musicologie of 1958, page x:
“Un musicien moyen peut, à peu de frais, copier une partition inédite, surtout si elle est postérieure au XVIe siècle, l’éditer et se faire passer pour musicologue, sans soupçonner les innombrables pièges que recèle cette opération et toutes les connaissances qu’il est nécessaire d’avoir acquises pour y échapper ».
(‘An average musician can easily copy an unpublished score, especially if it is later than the sixteenth century, publish it and pass himself off as a musicologist, without any idea about the countless traps hidden in that operation and all the different kinds of knowledge that it is necessary to acquire in order to avoid those traps’).
Jacques Chailley taught at the Sorbonne and was one of the giants in musicology, so that when he writes something it deserves attention. Chailley also has a connection with the guitar in that he was the supervisor of Danielle Ribouillault’s valuable thesis La technique de guitare en France dans la première moitié du 19e siècle.
And here is Michelle Warren, author of the perceptive article “The politics of textual scholarship” in the Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship of 2013, page 129, writing about textual scholarship (within which, as we saw, lies the making of professional editions including editions of music): “Textual scholarship of course cannot do without method, training, and practice”. Method, training, and practice. Anyone practising textual scholarship or the making of editions (which lies within textual scholarship) needs method, training, and practice, writes Michelle Warren.
The history of textual scholarship and editing
Textual scholarship goes back literally thousands of years and is enormous in its quantity and also in the quantity of discussion that has gone on about editions theory and practice, especially in the last one hundred years. I have written a much abbreviated synopsis of its history in my article “The ancient and honorable profession of textual scholarship, and the place of music editions within it” in Soundboard of March 2023. Briefly, in the late nineteenth century the work of Karl Lachmann became famous, which involved the use of stemmata and often a search for an Urtext, that is to say a supposed original text of which we have no surviving source but which might possibly be recovered by the study and comparison of the surviving sources. Then in 1928 Joseph Bédier published his article “La tradition manuscrite du Lai de l’ombre” in which he demonstrated that editions along Lachmannian lines were not working and from 1928 on editions made from just one source rather than from multiple sources gained favour.
Bédier worked several times with musicians, making editions in which Bédier edited the text and someone from the field of music edited the music. It is however a fact that during the next hundred years or so from 1928 onwards musicians and musicologists rarely contributed to the enormous amount of thought and work and discussion that took place in the field of ecdotics (editions theory). Cristina Urchueguía, for example, in her article on stemmatology in musicology in the Handbook of Stemmatology, writes: “The first striking fact about the relationship between stemmatology and musicology is how late the two disciplines met. First encounters cannot be traced before the end of the 1960s”. Nevertheless those who worked in editions theory in those last hundred years since 1928, even when they themselves worked in the editing of texts rather than music, again and again mentioned music and made it clear that their theories applied also to music.
If you yourself, dear reader, would like to find out more about the fascinating subject of textual scholarship and editing – and that is very relevant to any editions of music that you might buy or use – , you might like to start with the article which I mentioned “The ancient and honorable profession of textual scholarship, and the place of music editions within it” which I published in Soundboard in March 2023.
Brian Jeffery
