Music Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times: Editing and Translating Texts

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

These essays, first presented at the 26th annual conference on editorial
problems at the University of Toronto in 1990, shed light on the
problems of analyzing seminal texts and on the nature of music discourse
from the classical era to the renaissance.

Heading the list of contributors is the noted scholar Claude Palisca,
who provides a number of illuminating examples of how the editor must
aim to make the work accessibile to the modern reader when translating
early works on music theory. His concern is echoed by George Dimitri
Sawa, who examines medieval Arabic writings, and by Walter Kurt
Kreyszig, who discusses Franchino Gaffurio’s monumental “Theorica
Musice” (1492). James Grier describes the intricate process of
reassembling Adémar de Chabannes’s bold and controversial liturgy for
the feast of St. Martial, written in 1029. William and Allan Bowen
dissect Boethius’s interpretive translation of Ptolemy and Euclid in
sections of his “De institutione musica” and show that Boethius’s
adaptation, which was enormously influential in the Middle Ages,
ultimately says more about his philosophy of music than about that of
the original authors.

A leitmotif throughout is the fact that in earlier times it was
perfectly acceptable to appropriate other writers’ works, with or
without acknowledgement or emendation. One also cannot help thinking
while reading this thoughtful, well-written book that—to paraphrase
Shakespeare—all the world is context. Editors must be steeped in the
history and knowledge of the period in order to be able to help bridge
the gap in language, prose style, and allusion for the reader of today.