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Music Reference Services Quarterly, 16:131–140, 2013Published with license by Taylor & FrancisISSN: 1058-8167 print/1540-9503 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10588167.2013.808941

The Edition-Literate Singer: Edition Selection asan Information Literacy Competency

RACHEL E. SCOTTNed R. McWherter Library, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, USA

Many young singers are unaware that the edition of a piece theyselect may differ greatly from a different edition of the same piece.The proliferation of free and easily accessible public domain scoresonline has complicated the process of selection and has favoredconvenience over quality. This article explains how the evaluationof scores is a valid information literacy competency and detailssteps that music librarians can take to promote evaluation ofeditions among undergraduate vocal music majors.

KEYWORDS information literacy, music scores, singers

Undergraduate voice students are not taught to think critically about musicscores as sources of information. Young singers are often unfamiliar with thepieces given to them by their voice teachers; when students are handed aphotocopy with no composer or work information, and without any editorinformation, this decontexualizes the piece and greatly disserves the per-former. When required to track down an unknown piece for a diction orvocal repertoire assignment, the student typically accepts the first availablematch. After searching the song title in the OPAC—hopefully the table ofcontents has been indexed—the singer writes down a call number or twoand pulls a score. The problem arises when the piece has been authori-tatively edited and the accompaniment, text, or vocal part differs from thescholarly or critical edition. Most undergraduate singers would not think tocompare all of the versions available to them, nor would they track downthe appropriate volume of the collected edition to read the editor’s notes andbetter understand the composer’s intent.

© Rachel E. ScottAddress correspondence to Rachel E. Scott, 126 Ned R. McWherter Library, Memphis, TN

38152, USA. E-mail: rescott3@memphis.edu

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132 Rachel E. Scott

This scenario assumes that the undergraduate in question starts hersearch in the library, which is not always the case. The proliferation of publicdomain scores online means that the library is increasingly missing from theequation. Instead, students frequently choose ease of access over quality inthe selection of scores. Singers also choose convenience and cost over qual-ity in their preference for anthologies. They grow accustomed to anthologiescompiled according to voice type, in part because so much of their repertoireis from larger works. It is much less expensive to buy an oratorio anthologythan to purchase each of the works excerpted therein. However, removingthese pieces from the context of the larger work does not allow the singer toget a sense of the composer’s style or the role of the excerpt within the opera,oratorio, or song cycle. While a discussion of edition selection may be bettersuited to the studio or classroom, music librarians are uniquely equippedto promote the evaluation of editions among students. The question, then,is how can we leverage the rich reference sources in our collections andthe current institutional support for information literacy programs to engageundergraduate music majors in a discussion about selecting the best possiblesources for their performances?

The importance of information literacy in undergraduate music pro-grams is well-documented. The current set of Information LiteracyInstructional Objectives for Undergraduate Music Students1 was prepared bythe Music Library Association (MLA) Bibliographic Instruction Subcommitteeand received the endorsement of both the Association of College andResearch Libraries (ACRL) and the MLA in 2005. These objectives, however,owe much to earlier documents, including the Bibliographic Competenciesfor Music Students at an Undergraduate Level (1984) by the BibliographicInstruction Subcommittee of the Midwest Chapter of MLA and Objectives forInformation Literacy Instruction: A Model Statement for Academic Librarians(2001) by the ACRL. The 2005 Objectives reiterate ACRL’s definition ofinformation literacy: “To be information literate, a person must be able torecognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, eval-uate, and use effectively the needed information.”2 Music students mustrecognize when they need a particular score; find and access it; evaluateits appropriateness, accuracy, and authenticity; and use it effectively.

In 1996, Amanda Maple, Beth Christensen, and Kathleen Abromeitnoted that information literacy not only enhances academic performance, butalso enriches musical performance: “Information literacy informs more thanscholarship for music students; it promotes success in performance as well. . . they know how to evaluate critically a printed music edition.”3 This capa-bility to enrich performance is the real hook. In my experience as a musicstudent and performer, vocal performance students more readily engage withtheir repertoire than with assignments for music history courses. However,connecting information literacy to performance presents a challenge to musiclibrarians, because most music library instruction at the undergraduate level

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is tied to music history or musicology coursework instead of the vocal studioor seminar setting. Accordingly, the research assignments are often generallybiographical or historical in nature and not connected to the student’s reper-toire. Indeed, it is generally in a graduate music bibliography or researchmethods course that many performance students are first taught to comparemultiple arrangements and editions, to consult collected editions and histor-ical sets, and to read about the editorial processes involved in preparing acritical edition. Unfortunately, most undergraduate music programs do notinclude such a course.

Ruth Watanabe has found that performers enjoy using bibliographicaltools such as thematic catalogs and collected editions, because they are sointegral to the performer’s repertoire. Students have a great sense of accom-plishment after investing so much energy in researching the repertoire andfrequently ask, “Why couldn’t we have been taught this long ago?”4 Notonly do these tools help students prepare excellent program notes for theirrecitals, but they also help students to think critically about the processesinvolved in editing the music and to understand how editing can drasticallychange a musical work.

Music editing processes differ greatly depending on the composer, era ofcomposition, musical genre, and instrumentation. Most contemporary musicis only published once and may or may not be edited; classical vocal musicis often published in multiple editions, by various publishers and editors.Perhaps it is because so many editions of the same musical work are pub-lished that the word “edition” has become a catch-all term to encompassvarious differences in both format and content. In her dissertation AccessPoints Perceived as Useful in Searching for Scores and Recordings, Holly AnnGardinier discusses how the term “edition” is applied differently to scoresthan to non-musical monographs. Her interview subjects, all of whom aremusic faculty members, use the word edition in “at least four different ways:(1) to differentiate formats of a score, (2) to distinguish versions of a work,(3) to differentiate publishers, and (4) to identify edited works.”5 To musi-cians, a difference in edition may refer to the choice between miniature orfull-sized score, piano-vocal or full score, edited anthology or critical edition.

I learned the importance of thinking critically about editions not in alibrary or classroom setting, but in a voice lesson. As a freshman vocal per-formance major, my voice teacher assigned me “Le Violette” by AlessandroScarlatti. The following week I naively showed up for my lesson with myshiny new 26 Italian Songs and Arias: An Authoritative Edition Based onAuthentic Sources. I quickly learned that my “Le Violette” was not her“Le Violette.” My professor rejected my anthology, pulled out Twenty-FourItalian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, anddeclared that the accompaniment in my edition was “just awful.” Not onlyare the accompaniments very different, but the vocal line is also slightlydifferent. In short, the two editions presented two very different pieces.

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While this experience certainly opened my eyes to the existence ofdifferent editions, it did not provide a solution to the problem. I did notunderstand that my teacher’s preference was based on tradition and noton the quality of the editorial work. Her outright rejection of my editionmeant that I did not read the editor’s notes; I would have benefitted fromJohn Glenn Paton’s explanation of the manuscript sources he considered, thedrastic changes and omissions in the more familiar version, and his decisionto replicate the voice and continuo part exactly.

My next encounter with edition selection came the following summerwhen I noticed the word “Urtext”6 on the cover of the Bärenreiter score ofMozart’s Complete Songs I had purchased. While conservatory-bound pianistslikely discover Urtext as teenagers, singers often sing from anthologies intotheir early twenties. One of the voice professors interviewed by Gardiniersuggests that Urtexts are inaccessible to undergraduate singers: “They’venever been exposed to practically any music . . . you want to have access tomusic that they can get a hold of fairly easily without sending them into thebowels of the library,”7 but I think students should be given more credit. Afterfiguring out what Urtext meant, I realized that I had made an unwittingly wisechoice. However, I was unclear how, in the future, I would determine whichof the conflicting sources was authentic or preferred. Where could I learnmore about the history of the piece and its publication history? It was notuntil I took a graduate-level music research course that I was instructed tohead to the reference collection to consult the collected edition and thematiccatalog and to track down any scholarly editions and manuscript facsimilesavailable.

Though the examples above may not be representative of the typicalundergraduate experience, they do elucidate the need for a discussion ofmusic editing and publishing at some point in the undergraduate curricu-lum. Until undergraduate music students are taught to evaluate scores, theymay take for granted that the edition of the piece they have selected isthe specific piece their instructor or professor has in mind. Evaluating andselecting a score requires that students understand that a single piece isoften published by various publishers and in various arrangements, keys,languages, instrumentations, and compilations. While this kind of instructionmay be offered by a few voice teachers, librarians—as information literacyinstructors—are excellent candidates to promote evaluation of editions.

A good reference librarian knows to take into account what the studentalready knows and how she typically finds the information she needs. So,how do undergraduate singers select scores? Many start their search not inthe library catalog, but online. According to Kirstin Dougan’s recent surveyof the “Information Seeking Behaviors of Music Students,” sixty-five percentof music students access scores online via the International Music ScoreLibrary Project (IMSLP).8 IMSLP, however, is only one of many sources forpublic-domain and digital versions of music online, and the proliferation of

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scores online has changed the way that many music students find, access,and select scores. Due to the increasing amount of digitized scores onlineand the considerable amount of traffic to IMSLP and similar platforms, thelibrary is sometimes overlooked, and its potential contributions to qualitycontrol are rendered moot.

Many librarians have observed that while technology has facilitated dis-covery, the ensuing abundance of information can confuse and frustrateusers and does not necessarily encourage their critical faculties. In her article“Navigating Digital Sheet Music on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities,”Ana Dubnjakovic discusses the prevalence of digital music platforms anduser preference for their expanded access. She also emphasizes the impor-tance of critically thinking about the content: “Although coverage and qualityappear to be separate considerations, they are inextricably linked. This isbecause electronic scores found on individuals’ Web sites tend to lack thequality control that one might expect from a library, society, or even a com-pany, rendering them useless in a situation when accuracy is important.”9

Many students, gratified at the ease of access afforded by online musicsources, are unaware that they are at the same time sacrificing quality. Somepublic domain scores, for example, include a fully realized figured bass thatis dated and generally acknowledged as anachronistic, if not outright inaccu-rate. Several scores include ornaments, dynamics, and phrasing that are theeditor’s and not the composer’s. Young singers who have not been trainedto evaluate the quality of such questionable content would likely downloadthe content without a second thought.

Dubnjakovic very articulately describes why the selection of scoresdemands critical thinking:

These considerations might be of little or no consequence when deal-ing with sound recordings, but music scores are used in a much moreactive way: scores govern the performance; are necessary for harmonic,melodic, and rhythmic analysis; and are sometimes published in dif-ferent editions and arrangements geared specifically toward a range ofperformance and scholarship needs.10

A recording is a finished product, but a score is subject to interpretation.Until singers have learned to evaluate the quality of the score, they are likelyto unquestioningly accept the editor’s work as that of the composer’s.

Fortunately, most undergraduate music students have not completelyrejected the library in favor of online score collections. Dougan’s surveyfound that the catalog is not viewed “as a last resort.” She suggests that it is“likely . . . because so many music materials (especially reliable scores andparts) are not yet easily and freely available elsewhere.”11 Librarians have thebenefit of better and more comprehensive collections, so how can they bestuse this advantage?

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What can librarians do to promote evaluation of editions among under-graduate music majors? What kinds of reference transactions promote criticalthinking about edition selection? It is unlikely that when a freshman stopsby the reference desk and asks for Caccini’s “Amarilli, mia Bella,” she willhave the patience to stop and read the editorial notes in the A-R editionof Le Nuove Musiche e Nuova Maniera di Scriverle. However, the freshmanmight have that patience. When students ask such a direct question, they areoften not aware of the options available. As Dougan explains, the complex-ity of musical scores and recordings—the variety of formats, arrangements,generic titles—necessitates that “music reference interactions involve a highlevel of instruction.”12 It is the librarian’s responsibility to provide users withresources and skills that they can use to enrich their performances and theirunderstanding of the music, not to get them back into the practice room asquickly as possible.

A successful reference transaction requires the librarian to determinethe exact information needs of the patron. Some good follow-up questionsto the Caccini inquiry above might include the following:

1. Are you interested in a performance edition?2. Did your instructor tell you to track down a specific edition/arrangement?3. Do you want to sing it in the original language, or do you need a singable

translation?4. Are you interested in the original key or a transposition?5. The library has that song in multiple anthologies and editions; shall I write

down a few call numbers so that you can compare them?

Any of the above questions would introduce some complexity to the seem-ingly straightforward activity of pulling the first available score off theshelf.

If instruction for a studio or seminar setting is requested, thelibrarian could devise a presentation based on the previously discussedInformation Literacy Instructional Objectives for Undergraduate MusicStudents. A worksheet and a document that lists correlation of the worksheettasks to relevant standards and performance indicators are included inAppendices 1 and 2. The librarian would demonstrate and explain theworksheet process first, and then answer questions as students completethe worksheet themselves using a piece in their own repertoire. Immediateapplication is important because, as Diane Vanderpol and Cheryl Tarantohave noted, “A student may see a librarian hold up a volume of The NewGrove Dictionary of Music and Musicians or RILM Abstracts during a one-shot class session, but until they are in the library and have a valid, interestingreason to use it, they will not remember what they might have seen.”13

By collaborating with the voice teacher to select a smaller work suchas a single song and a larger work such as opera or oratorio that is in the

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repertoire of many of the students, the librarian could ensure that the instruc-tion would have immediacy to the students. The librarian would demonstratethe process of consulting Grove Music Online to identify the availability ofthe composer’s collected works and thematic catalog, and to identify anyunique title information from the works list. Relevant passages from thethematic catalog and collected works could be passed around or projectedoverhead so that students could see the importance of these resources inunderstanding the publication and performance history, provenance, andthe editing processes involved in creating a modern performance score. Thelibrarian would then demonstrate how to search the catalog and identifyvarious editions of the work.

After identifying several varying editions, the librarian would project orpass around examples so that students could see the kind of differences thatexist between various editions. It is important to bring several different kindsof editions of the same piece so that students can see for themselves thedifferences between good and bad. Heavy-handed phrasing, dynamics, andtempo markings may be less egregious than wrong notes and anachronisticaccompaniments, but they become apparent upon examination. Studentsmust also be taught to make note of the editor’s work. Good editing istransparent; editors should reveal what sources were consulted and whichwere omitted, which notes are theirs and not the composers, and whichphrasing, fingering, tempo, and dynamic markings are their own additions.Until students can see this for themselves, they may dismiss these concernsas trivial.

In order for any course-integrated instruction to be effective, the librar-ian must collaborate with teaching faculty. Integrating information literacyinstruction into the studio’s seminar or master class setting signifies theteacher’s endorsement for both the importance of researching one’s per-formance pieces and doing so using library resources. Beth Christensen hasidentified several benefits of course-integrated library instruction, the mostimportant of which is that “The library is perceived as being integral to whatit means to be a musician. Thinking critically about music is a real goal,whether in choosing a score, selecting a recording, or finding critical workswritten about music.”14 Both as a musician and a librarian, I cannot think ofa better message to convey to young singers.

Most large collections of scores, whether digital or physical, will includeseveral erroneous editions. While music librarians endeavor to promote thebest possible sources, they can rarely compete with the convenience of freelyavailable, downloadable scores online. In order to ensure that young singersare consulting quality sources, we must convey to them the importance ofthinking critically about scores as information sources. Until students real-ize the degree to which the same piece can differ from one edition toanother, they will not spend the time and mental energy to evaluate a score.Librarians’ increasing engagement with and fluency in information literacy

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instruction enable students to promote evaluation of information sources ina variety of teaching contexts; the rich resources in music library collectionsprovide ample fodder for comparison of good and bad editions. Music librar-ians must leverage both advantages to encourage and develop the criticalfaculties of undergraduate singers.

NOTES

1. Paul Cary and Laurie J. Sampsel, “Information Literacy Instructional Objectives forUndergraduate Music Students: A Project of the Music Library Association, Bibliographic InstructionSubcommittee,” Notes, Second Series 62, no. 3 (2006): 663–679.

2. Association of College and Research Libraries, "Objectives for Information Literacy Instruction:A Model Statement for Academic Librarians," January 2001, http://\nobreak www.ala.org/acrl/standards/objectivesinformation (accessed December 31, 2012).

3. Amanda Maple, Beth Christensen, and Kathleen A. Abromeit, “Information Literacy forUndergraduate Music Students: A Conceptual Framework,” Notes 52 (March 1996): 752.

4. Ruth Watanabe, “Teaching Bibliography to Performers in a University School of Music,” MusicReference Services Quarterly 2, no. 1/2 (1993): 195–202.

5. Holly Ann Gardinier, “Access points perceived as useful in searching for music scores andrecordings,” Thesis (Ph. D.), University of California, Los Angeles, 2004: 55.

6. Urtext (“original text”) is a highly fraught musicological term for the first version of a piece thatmost closely realizes the composer’s intent. For a definition of Urtext, please see Stanley Boorman’s entryin Grove Music Online.

7. Gardinier, 63.8. Kirstin Dougan, "Information Seeking Behaviors of Music Students," Reference Services Review

40, no. 4 (2012): 558–573.9. Ana Dubnjakovic, "Navigating Digital Sheet Music on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities,"

Music Reference Services Quarterly 12, nos. 1–2 (2009): 6–7.10. Dubnjakovic, 6–7.11. Dougan, 567.12. Quoted in Dougan, 559.13. Diane Vanderpol and Cheryl Taranto, “Information Literacy: A New Tune for Library Instruction

to Music Students,” Music Reference Services Quarterly 8, no. 2 (December 2002): 22.14. Beth Christensen, “Warp, Weft, and Waffle: Weaving Information Literacy into an Undergraduate

Music Curriculum,” Notes 60, no. 3 (2004), 618.

APPENDIX A

Edition Evaluation Worksheet

1. Choose a piece you are currently working on (composed before 1900).Look up the composer/work in Grove.

a. Note any terms or additional information related to the work of interest(uniform titles, opus numbers, and/or alternate titles) in the blank below.

__________________________________________________________________

b. What is the title of the composer’s collected work and thematic cat-alog? Provide call number in the blank below and pull them from theshelves.

__________________________________________________________________

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2. Use the terminology in 1a to search the catalog. Identify one of each ofthe different types of musical scores. Write the call number in the blank andpull them from the shelves.

a. Complete works __________________________________________

b. Scholarly/critical/Urtext ____________________________________

c. Edited anthology __________________________________________

d. Arrangement, transcription, or transposition ___________________

3. Compare the scores in front of you. Take a few minutes to skim the editor’snotes.

a. Which do you think is the most authoritative source? Provide threereasons why:

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

b. How are the editor’s markings (suggested ornaments, dynamics, etc.)indicated? Do the scores indicate them in the same way? Explain howthey are indicated and any differences.

__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

APPENDIX B

Correlation of Worksheet to Information Literacy InstructionalObjectives for Undergraduate Music Students

Worksheet task 1 relates to:Standard 1. The information literate student determines the nature and extentof the information needed.

● Performance Indicator 1. The information literate student defines andarticulates the need for information.

● Performance indicator 2. The information literate student identifies avariety of types and formats of potential sources for information.

Worksheet task 2 relates to:Standard 2. The information literate student accesses needed informationeffectively and efficiently.

● Performance indicator 2. The information literate student constructs andimplements effectively-designed search strategies.

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● Performance indicator 3. The information literate student retrievesinformation online or in person using a variety of methods.

Worksheet task 3 relates to:Standard 3. The information literate student evaluates information and itssources critically and incorporates selected information into his or herknowledge base and value system.

● Performance Indicator 2. The information literate student articulates andapplies initial criteria for evaluating both the information and its sources.

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