The Origins of Historical Editions
Up until the 18th century, music performance and distribution centered around current compositions. Even professional musicians rarely were familiar with music written more than a half century before their own time. In the second half of the 18th century, an awakening of interest in the history of music prompted the publication of numerous collections of older music (for example, William Boyce's Cathedral Music, published around 1760-63, and Giovanni Battista Martini's Esemplare, ossia Saggio... di contrappunto, published around 1774-5). Around the same time, the proliferation of pirated editions of music by popular composers (such as Haydn and Mozart) prompted respected music publishers to embark on "oeuvres complettes," intended as uniform editions of the entire musical output of these composers. Unfortunately, many of these early complete works projects were never finished.
In the 19th century, the emergence of romantic hero worship of composers, sometimes described as the "cult of genius," fired the enthusiasm for Complete Works series for important composers. The development of the academic field of musicology also contributed to an interest in more accurate and well-researched editions of musical works. Finally, the rise of Nationalism within music circles influenced the creation of Monumental Editions devoted to geographical regions, such as Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst begun in 1892 and Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich begun in 1894.
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Famous quotes containing the words origins, historical and/or editions:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)