Saturday, February 12, 2011

Oops

We already had music arranged, but while surfing sheet music sites, I found that Mutopia had typeset parts for K. 191. I sent a sample to the conductor, and after learning they were free, he decided to use them, rather than the rental. I then decided to take a look over them before printing, since I've been fooling around a bit with Lilypond, just in case there was anything I wanted to change. Big mistake -- I should have either kept my mouth shut, and used the rentals, or not looked too closely at these parts. Because once I started going over them with a fine toothed comb, and comparing every dynamic and articulation with what's given in the NMA edition,   there was a *ton* of stuff to change. I can get pretty persnickety when I'm in the mood, years of writing computer code will do that to you. Sometimes I think I missed my true calling as a copy editor. There were very few actual wrong notes, fortunately, at least that I've caught so far, but many markings didn't make sense. Reading the parts or the score, I'd find something that looked wrong, and check the NMA, and the 1881 Breitkopf & Härtel edition on IMSLP that the Mutopia version was transcribed from.  A good fraction of the time there was an error, sometimes one introduced by the transcriber, and more often it was already in the B&H edition. When published editions disagreed, I mostly (but not completely) went with NMA, since not only do I expect it was more carefully edited, but also the choices made seem to largely make sense to me.  I checked every one though, and kept a list in case I want to revisit them later. The whole thing took far longer than I expected, and kept me up late (and away from practicing) for three nights in a row. The good news is that I'm now more familiar with Lilypond.

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