Making the Music Work: Toward a 'Dynamic Edition' of Chopin

Abstract

My keynote paper at the SMI's Annual Conference in 2007 – ‘Sounding out Chopin: New Sources and Resources’ – reviewed three projects in the pipeline at the time: Chopin's First Editions Online (launched in 2007), Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (eventually published in 2010) and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition (then in its first developmental phase). The original version of this essay covered similar ground, focusing in particular on the last of these initiatives; it was published in 2015 in an anthology entitled Genèses musicales , edited by Nicolas Donin, Almuth Grésillon and Jean-Louis Lebrave. A surprising amount of updating was required before it could be reprinted here. Not only did the OCVE project complete the second developmental phase that was in train when I first wrote the essay, but another workphase would follow in which major technical advances would occur along with changes in the online display and functionality. The essay is therefore quite different from both the 2007 keynote and its original counterpart. Although the bibliographic apparatus has not been systematically updated, some new references have been added to fill the most significant lacunae. The speed with which the online environment continues to evolve never ceases to amaze, and in that light the relative lack of progress in online approaches to the critical editing of music since Frans Wiering's lament in 2009 (quoted below) seems remarkable. But there have nevertheless been important developments, and this essay and the recent publications cited in it allude to them, even if much more could be said to do justice to all that has happened over the last fifteen years.