When I took on my graduate research fellowship at Appalachian State, I knew I would be engraving the work of Tui St. George Tucker. For the most part, it has turned out exactly as I expected: I read her handwritten scores and “engrave” them in modern notation software to make the scores readable for future performances. Engraving was once done on metal plates at print shops; we don’t need them anymore now that we have new technology and software, but the term has remained. One person was recently intrigued by my work, thinking I was actually engraving real metal plates. No, nothing that fancy.
I have to say being an “engraver” in the old-fashioned sense does carry more prestige than what is actually involved in my work today – typing in letters and numbers. For example, in my software, typing in “6A” places a quarter note on A, though I may have to change the octave using another couple of keys. It’s not unlike playing the piano while sight-reading; as I type away, I barely have to look at my hands.
I’ve always wondered what it is like going to research OLD manuscripts from a couple hundred years ago, traveling to other countries to see if the modern-day scores truly match what Bach or Beethoven or Chopin really wrote, or to see if there is an undiscovered or long-forgotten score that needs to be brought to the public eye like an ancient archeological find.
Tui St. George Tucker died in 2004, which was not very long ago. I didn’t expect to do anything but simply copy her scores. I certainly didn’t expect to solve any mysteries.
I was wrong.
Granted, the mysteries I’m solving are not big ones, but they are important to anyone looking to study or perform Tui’s scores. But since Tui is dead, I can’t ask her any questions about her scores. I have to make decisions that make sense to me as a fellow composer.
Here are some of the mysteries I have solved in my first semester:
In one piano piece, music was written in the treble clef in the last system of the page, but the bass clef had been cut off. This section was an otherwise perfect repeat of a previous section, so I referred back to the first section to fill in the missing notes.
In another project, I had to create a score from two viola parts. In three of the four movements, the parts did not have an equal number of measures! Not only did I need to figure out where the missing measures belonged, I had to determine what they contained. In all of those instances, I went with the simplest explanation: Tui lost track of counting when there were multiple measures of repeated material. (Losing track of counting is very easy to do, even for a composer.)
In my last project of the semester, unbeknownst to me, the unnumbered pages in the file I had access to were out of order. I typed in 3/5 of the score before I got to a point where I said, “THIS cannot possibly follow THAT!” and began to look for the wrinkle in the music so I could align everything in the proper order. I was very glad I was not engraving on metal plates! The cut-and-paste function in my software made that a quick fix.
I’ve had to decide whether a sloppily written note is on a line or a space. I’ve added articulations and dynamics that were clearly unintentionally left out in one part. I say “clearly” but this is, of course, my educated opinion because the score does not explicitly say.
The overarching question is, “Am I trying to make this engraving original or playable?” Sometimes the original contains mistakes or inappropriate markings. (This is a common issue – composers are not experts on every instrument and need input from instrumentalists/vocalists to know best how to notate certain musical ideas.) In these cases, should I be using Tui’s marks or the “fixes” that were written in someone else’s hand?
I, of course, run all my decisions by my supervisor who has the final say on the finished product. But I do feel a sense of being important and having some authority, since I’m more than a copyist. I’m a musical detective.
Have you come across any musical mysteries? Tell me about it in the comments!