Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

154 ❧ chapter fifteen
supplied. There may be all sorts of eccentricities that invite being brought into
line in terms of our modern passion for consistency. Consistency is a precau-
tion by which writers and composers of the eighteenth century were seldom
troubled. They happily spelled proper names and even very common words
in several different ways on the same page. There are dangers in reducing a
text to absolute consistency, as, for example, in the notation of appoggiaturas
in Scarlatti. Scarlatti’s original notation of grace notes is as wildly inconsistent
as Bach’s, and yet every so often there is evidence of a different intention that
would be lost if everything were to be reduced to a consistent notation. In such
cases, an editor would do well to transcribe the notation as it stands and to
add the warning, however, that the inconsistencies of the text are not neces-
sarily binding. There is also the matter of correcting obvious mistakes and the
vexing question of how to deal with mistakes that are perhaps not mistakes,
after all, but idiosyncrasies. Scarlatti again is full of these. Does one correct or
does one leave the text and let the performer correct? The letters of Mozart,
for example, if ironed out, spelled properly and rendered consistent, lose an
enormous amount of their fl avor. Yet it would have been much simpler for
the editor to modernize them, since the proofreading of a faithful reproduc-
tion of an inconsistent original text can become ten times more diffi cult, as I
can testify from experience. One has not only to check one’s own accuracy in
reproducing these ridiculous idiosyncrasies, but one must constantly defend
them against the printer whose every instinct is to regularize them and against
the copy editor who is likewise disposed.
Beyond rendering a text usable by completing it with conjecture concerning
the composer’s intentions, there are further additions that in varying degrees
may become desirable. Just as a verbal text using obsolete words and technical
expressions may demand a glossary in order to render it usable by the average
reader, so a musical text with eccentric notation or obsolete ornamentation
may demand some kind of explanation. Supplementary information and ref-
erences may be desirable, as in the editing of correspondence and of certain
literary works. Some works stand more easily by themselves than others. Some
need to have comment and cross-references in order to be understood.
In editing a literary text, one hardly ever descends to such phonetic indica-
tions of pronunciation as are given in dictionaries. Only in the most elemen-
tary grade school texts and in beginning language studies is recourse taken to
such devices. But in musical texts it has been customary for some one hundred
and fi fty years to give directions for performance. Often these directions are
no more than guides to pronunciation. One would be tempted to think that
a literate musician should have no need of them, no more than a person who
knows a language needs to be told in the pages of a literary text how to pro-
nounce it. But certainly most “performing editions” have done little to encour-
age literacy among performers!
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