Contribution of the professional fo music educafiotrWe may therefore say that the modern school, while losing in huma-
nity what it gains in technique (in the oft-quoted words of Bernard
Shaw), compares the older teaching framework to ‘beautiful ruins’.
The publisher with modern ideas must, after reducing out-of-date
matter to a minimum for the inevitable few who are behind the times,
take the initiative in publishing the great works of every age and every
country, revising them in a manner acceptable to present-day taste;
that is, he must rid them of the tiresome reference signs, footnotes,
comments, examples, amendments, etc., which Bulow employed to a
moderate extent and which reached alarming proportions with the J%
de si2cZe editors.
It is then that the publisher finds himself at grips with a problem
which he cannot ignore, namely editing. Very detailed editing is on
the decline; but absolute non-revision-the Urtext, i.e. an original
musical text left unaltered-is also unsuitable from the teaching stand-
point and this for two reasons: (a) Anyone with teaching experience
must admit that a lesson given on the basis of an original text can
hardly last less than half a day; fingering, pedalling and phrasing must
be marked, grace-notes elucidated, etc. (b) It is quite absurd to think
that original texts are models of precision because they were created
by a genius, as though they were the fruit of a copyist’s labours and not
the result of a creative adventure. The Urtexxt must therefore be cor-
rected and revised, to avoid a repetition of the somewhat humorous
incident of the modern-minded Italian who extolled a simple clerical
error which he took for a stroke of genius.
The firm of Ricordi also publishes editions of original musical texts
which contain the revisions that can be regarded as essential and do
not attach exaggerated importance to slips; its publications provide
schools with the minimum of essential corrections, and abolish all the
literary embellishments which no-one really reads.
Thus schools and publishing firms should be in constant touch with
each other so that they can move along the same lines and, by ‘com-
pleting’ each other, reflect, as it were, the allegory of the builder’s
arch, defined by Leonard0 da Vinci as ‘two weak elements which
together are strong’. This definition may be taken as a symbol of the
future relationship between teaching and publishing.
[Translated from the French]