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COMMUNICATIONS/The Reviewer Responds

2007; Music Library Association; Volume: 63; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1534-150X

Lois Rosow, Ronald Broude,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

This column provides forum for responses to the contents of this journal, and for information of interest to readers. The editor reserves the right to publish letters in excerpted form and to edit them for conciseness and clarity. To the Editor: I respond to Ronald Broude's review of my edition of Lully's Armide (Notes 62, no. 3 [March 2006]: 797-802). While we can disagree on matters of editorial presentation, his interpretation of my text-critical argument misrepresents it. First of all, my description of as a hypothetical copy containing all published states of every page is not, as Broude claims (p. 802), a phrase that makes no sensethough by omitting the word hypothetical, he certainly renders it senseless. Here I simply paraphrase G. Thomas Tanselle's definition (The Concept of Ideal Copy, Studies in Bibliography 33 [1980]: 46). Tanselle's characterization belongs to the field of descriptive bibliography, not to editorial procedure; an editor must perforce choose among the states of each page. As for my intentionalist position, Broude is quite right that I cannot possibly establish Lully's intentions from the extant sources. That is given of traditional textual criticism: the omega at the top of the stemma will always be an unattainable goal, toward which the editor strives. Yet surely textcritical stance is set of values as much as set of possibilities. The traditional textcritic sought to strip away the contributions of editors and censors (and in the case of music, performers, and impresarios); recent theory argues for embracing those contributions as part of the work. My position on Armide is that the distinction barely exists. Apart from matters limited by the printer's technology, Lully controlled virtually everything that we might notate in the edition-and here I include the compositional revisions made in the publishing house, for there is clear evidence that these were made in the manuscript parts used for performance as well, at roughly the same time. This argument in no way depends on the presence (or, for that matter, absence) of an autograph score. Lully's intention encompassed the authorized contributions of others, certainly his secretary Pascal Collasse, whatever those contributions might have been. LOIS ROSOW Ohio State University The reviewer responds: I am sorry to find myself responding, as I must, to communication from scholar whose work I have long known and respected. In her communication, Lois Rosow raises specific questions, which I shall address first, and, by implication, more general questions to which I shall turn later. I stand by my assertion that Rosow's definition of an as a hypothetical copy containing all published states of every page is, as written, meaningless. An ideal copy is in fact copy-it may be hypothetical or real-consisting of complete set of sheets each of which reflects the latest corrected states-and only the latest corrected states-of the two formes from which it was printed. (When discussing an ideal copy, bibliographers usually speak not of but of the composed and imposed type from which one side of sheet-two pages in folio, four pages in quarto, etc.-is printed; the forme is the unit to which round of corrections is made.) What makes it possible-and, indeed, necessary-to speak of ideal copies is the proof reading practice of printers during the first three centuries of printing. Proofing was done while printing was in progress, and the proofing, like the printing, was done forme at time. After all the pages of forme had been proofed, the press would be stopped (hence the term stop-press correction), the mistakes corrected, and printing resumed. However, the sheets printed before the corrections had been made were not necessarily discarded, and so when copies were assembled any single copy might contain mixture of sheets some of which had been printed from two corrected formes, some of which had been printed from two uncorrected formes, and some of which had been printed from one corrected forme and one uncorrected one. …