October 27, 2023

How falling in love led to the worst arts and crafts project

Sharon's Weekly Head Dump

I don’t know how other people do it. I see performers and scholars out here churning out papers/articles, touring, writing books, working on music, releasing recordings, teaching full loads of students, winning grants…and here I am, flailing around trying to figure out if I can get special dispensation from the universe to somehow get an extra 6 hours in the day just to catch up on all the work I need to do. Because I feel so behind: there is work on the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto I’ve left outstanding for months longer than I’d like, meetings I haven’t set up and emails I haven’t sent, patchwork I need to do in the recording studio, music I was supposed to start learning ages ago but haven’t started, performances I haven’t gotten around to booking…aaaarghhhhh.

[throws blanket over head and crawls into corner]

So why did I start embarking on even more time-consuming work this week? Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

Back in 2021 Samantha Ege released her album Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price and I fell in love. Specifically, Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1 made me feel feelings in a way that I hadn’t experienced since the first time I heard Chopin’s Ballade in G Minor as an angsty teenager. The section that starts around 7:14 in the video below grabbed me so fiercely I felt chills.

I couldn’t find the sheet music for Fantasie Nègre No. 1 (henceforth referred to as FN1 because I’m lazy) so I messaged Samantha, who I totally want to be when I grow up, and as I’ve mentioned previously in this newsletter, she told me that FN1 was unpublished and that she’d gone to Arkansas in person to copy the music from the archives.

So I bought the score for Fantasie Nègre No. *2* and learned-performed-recorded that instead (and absolutely loved it), all the while keeping an eye out for when FN1 would be published. I had full confidence that it would be available at some point, because in 2018 G. Schirmer (a publisher that musicians generally avoid like the devil because their editions are famously riddled with errors) acquired the exclusive rights to Florence Price’s entire catalog.

Earlier this month I checked and FN1 was indeed finally available, so I hit “add to cart” so fast and happily forked over $30 for the sheet music for this one piece. This week I started learning FN1 in earnest and…[deep, weary sigh] found that Schirmer has stayed on brand and upheld their reputation as a publisher that happily churns out music full of errors.

Usually the solution is obvious—don’t buy Schirmer—but in this case, there is no other option, because Schirmer has the exclusive publishing rights to Florence Price’s music.

I have the immense luck in this case of having access to the original manuscript that Price submitted to the Library of Congress (I cannot show it or say how I got it, which I realize makes me sound like I heisted the document, National Treasure style, but that makes me sound very roguish and exciting, so let’s go with that)—it’s a super valuable resource for me but it’s also very unfair because the manuscript is not publicly available and if you’re just a normal pianist who wants to play the music you bought and have the right to play, you’re **** out of luck if you just want to know what the right notes are.

This week I started checking the notes in Schirmer’s edition against the manuscript, which is extraordinarily tedious work—work the publishing house was supposed to have done—and then patching the errors with a roll of white tape, handwriting the correct notes in, which is even more tedious work. In this age of easy digital notation, I never get to show off my flawless music handwriting anymore (people used to gape at it in music school when they saw my assignments), so please admire:

You can see the ghost of Schirmer’s wrong notes peeking out from behind the tape I’ve applied; they were so off that I started sincerely wondering if whoever was transcribing it from Florence Price’s manuscript was able to read music.

You may think that’s the end of the story: Schirmer, once sloppy, always sloppy, but at least sloppiness isn’t a crime. But the plot thickens!

You know how I said that Schirmer has the exclusive rights to Price’s works? God bless scholars; I found out that Douglas Shadle keeps an online catalog of Florence Price’s oeuvre, and via the dedicated page for FN1, I discovered that there’s an obscure anthology, collected and edited by Helen Walker-Hill in 1992, containing FN1.

This morning I decided that having another edition I could work from would be worth every penny, so I forked over $50 to download the digital edition and print out this alternate version of FN1. (For those of you keeping track at home, I am now $80 in the hole for a single work of music.)

I took my new sheet music over to the piano, started checking, and made a weird discovery.

This obscure edition from 1992 had the exact errors as Schirmer’s edition, which, in case you forgot, was printed this year, 2023. In some cases Schirmer’s version even had extra errors.

“Maybe these are honest errors that two different teams could have independently come to, working off the same manuscript, and all these are just coincidences?” you might say.

It’s not…impossible, but looking at the manuscript, I have to report that Florence Price’s writing is very clear—in the case of all the mistakes I’ve shown here, there’s no question whatsoever in the manuscript as to what her intentions were. Furthermore, these mistakes make no musical sense; all an editor needs to do is to play these notes, as I did, and realize that stuff just sounds weird. (In the last example I gave, the wrong note in the right hand is not only meant to double a note in the left hand, it’s also part of the main theme and therefore doesn’t match every other instance of the theme in the piece.)

So the mistakes match up; ordinarily, identical mistakes (or markings, or editorial suggestions, or whatever) in two editions would mean that they’re really the same edition done by the same person, who would be credited both times. But there is noticeably no editor credited in Schirmer’s edition. Here are photos of the title and first pages of Schirmer’s FN1 on the right, compared to a different work (FN4) on the left, where you can see an editor named very clearly.

I shouldn’t/can’t state what this all suggests because I am [halo appears over head] not remotely accusing anyone of anything. I just a baby I’m just a pianist being very nerdy about sheet music. All I can state are the facts: there are very specific errors in a 1992 edition by Helen Walker-Hill that totally coincidentally are also in the 2023 edition Schirmer put out in which they don’t credit anyone for the editing work done.

Some miscellaneous facts that are totally unrelated, lol I’m so random: Helen Walker-Hill passed away in 2013. Schirmer announced their exclusive worldwide publishing rights in 2018. Most of Florence Price’s works don’t enter the public domain in the US until 2024.

What were we talking about? Oh nothing at all. Please enjoy this delightful TikTok of “Empty Chair at Empty Tables” sung to the tune of the Muppets Show theme song.

Other things going on in my head

When I’m not getting a headache from having to do Schirmer’s editing work for them, I’m probably listening to Måneskin’s “HONEY (ARE U COMING?)” which is super fun to rock out to.

No newsletter next week as I will be traveling; happy almost-Halloween, and until next time! 🎹