AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday morning 59
fact named for its bassus head motive, and suggest that the chanson Presque transi has at best
a limited claim to the status of cantus prius factus.
More significant than the matter of titles, however, is the web of connections that unifies
no fewer than nine works by Ockeghem and de Orto. The latter’s contributions can be read
as a deliberate, thoroughgoing homage to Ockeghem of a sort rarely encountered outside the
L’homme armé tradition. Indeed, de Orto’s settings engage with Ockeghem’s style not merely
via melodic quotation but through a variety of procedures, ranging from outright stylistic
mimicry to allusion in the context of a thoroughly un-Ockeghemian sound world. Taken
together, these relationships suggest that de Orto played an important role in the reception
of Ockeghem’s music at the turn of the sixteenth century, and expose the imposing shadow
Ockeghem’s music cast on de Orto and his contemporaries.
IN THE EDITOR’S WORKSHOP: SIXTEENTH-CENTURY
TRANSMISSION AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Ted Dumitrescu
Utrecht University
It is time for music editors and scholars to reconsider the status of some of the most basic
tools employed in the creation and evaluation of critical editions. Over the past several decades,
the field of textual scholarship has witnessed potent criticisms of its traditional methodologies,
as well as proposals for alternative techniques rooted in the work of noted philological
skeptics. The Common Error method, formalized upon the basis of the pioneering nineteenth-century
work of Karl Lachmann, long enjoyed a central status as the basic means of
establishing textual readings in modern editions redacted from variant versions and imperfect
copies, but is increasingly viewed as insufficient and even fundamentally flawed. The attempt
to strip away supposed scribal corruptions and thereby produce a single authorial “Urtext”
has been argued to be historically dishonest and even deformative of the social conditions of
textual production and reception, both for medieval literature (e.g., Cerquiglini and the New
Philology) and for texts in the age of mechanical reproduction and publication (McGann).
Newer approaches aim to demonstrate the relations of surviving textual states divorced from
the idea of (original or final) authorial intentions, borrowing approaches from fields such as
computational biology to resolve long-standing methodological quandaries.
Musicology, however, has for much of its history lagged considerably behind textual
scholarship in matters pertaining to textual criticism, where specific methods have been first
developed and first discarded. The two major manuals of music philology in current use, by
Feder (1987) and Grier (1996), are recent but largely advocate the most traditionalist positions.
Many music editions themselves exhibit problematic usages, tacitly sidestepping classic
philological rules where they patently cannot apply to particular musical situations, but asserting
their validity otherwise. This reluctance of musical scholarship to engage with modern
text-critical approaches is not purely a matter of reasoned conservatism, but is also predicated
upon technological working conditions. The newest textual methodologies rely increasingly
upon computational models, such as the “phylogenetic” techniques of the New Stemmatics,
which are readily implemented for text data whereas musical data requires significantly more
complex programming groundwork.
The situation of music in information technology has fortunately been developing rapidly
in the twenty-first century, to the point where sophisticated computer encoding of notation