TECLA EDITIONS

A few words on how texts are edited, especially those published by Tecla

Traditional methods of editing texts in the West go back a thousand years and more, to Byzantium and beyond. Classical scholars in Western Europe continued the techniques that had been used there and also developed their own (one of those scholars was Aldus Manutius of Venice, a name well known in the computer world, who was not only a type designer but also an editor of Greek texts). Textual scholarship in the vernacular languages followed later, and music editing followed as well.

Today we have new ideas in criticism which make us think about editing in different ways, for example examining the position of the reader as well as of the creator of the text. But whatever those new ideas may be, there is still as great a need as ever to establish the basic text, from which one can start. Different sources still need to be compared, scholars still need to sort out problems of textual transmission. So when it comes to providing a good text of a given work, and of publishing it, there is often a need for a modern edition, in which a scholar has looked at all the sources and made choices, and there can also be a place quite simply for a reproduction of an original source. Different people prefer different things: lutenists on the whole would rather have a simple photographic reproduction of the original tablature than any modern edition. So it is in Tecla: sometimes we give a modern text (re-engraved if it is music), and sometimes we reproduce an original source. In the case of Sor, whose works we publish, we first provided his Complete Works in reprint form, but they are a bit difficult to read in places, and there are some editorial problems, so now we are providing the music in the re-engraved New Complete Works. Anyone who wants to, will still be able to get the reprint version.