Take from a musicologist and semi-professional performer: IMSLP is great for finding quick scores of random stuff, but the editions are often pretty shoddy, like either super outdated with weird editorial decisions that no one's agreed with for the last 50 years, or someone's totally amateur transcription full of errors and equally weird decisions. Treat it like you might treat Wikipedia as a research source (ok as an initial point of entry, but soon you want to dig into the real sources).
I am working on adding new scores, but in many cases these old things are either the only editions published or the only editions we can take.
IMSLP accepts urtext editions over 25 years old. We have a good amount of these from series for the most famous composers (e.g., Mozart, Bach...) but these are only a minority of the collection. We of course would like to add more.
Otherwise, for "original" editorial editions, as well as arrangements, etc., we take them so long as the contributors of original creative contributors died in 1971 or earlier, or, as the case may be with amateur editions, with permission (note: we actually do have a significant number of quite good editions/arrangements contributed with permission, but we have a lot of files on the site overall).
The other thing is, since we draw from many existing digitizations (such as national libraries), and most of their digitized documents are quite old.
Anyway, we are not really like Wikipedia, since we have a great deal of those primary sources on our site (incl. many autograph mss., as well as historical editions), and we're fundamentally more a collection of sources than a synthesis of them like WP. But we are certainly not a complete collection of sources, by any means (for both practical and legal reasons).
For sure, I'm not meaning to denigrate IMSLP, as it's a great project that offers access to so much material that's otherwise a pain to get to. I was just trying to make the distinction that when I want the highest-quality materials I can find for performance or study, that's not where I'll find them. But it's wonderful for quick easy access, invaluable for browsing and making finds when you're far from any university library etc.
> IMSLP accepts urtext editions over 25 years old.
Do you have a working definition of "urtext"? A lot of famous Bach and Mozart keyboard stuff was written on C clef for the right hand, but many so-called urtexts transcribe it to G. I don't understand how this can be seriously called urtext.
What counts as a purely mechanical adjustment? Can you apply any trivial and reversible operation to the notation? I guess changing the time signature to an equivalent one is acceptable. Changing all the notes to half their length? Replacing dotted notes by ligatures? Switching the key would be probably a "creative" change, but it's just as mechanical as the others. What if I move the key up a semitone but then I add a text that says to tune the instrument a semitone down? Does said text really matter, considering the historical tuning has changed by almost a whole semitone along the centuries?
I feel very uneasy changing the notation of the original, even if the music sounds the same, and naming it "urtext".
No big deal... after all, you can buy "urtext" with editor-provided fingerings from many publishers, so the word is almost meaningless at this point.
Any change that can be made without "skill and judgment" as would be involved in the creation of an original work is definitively mechanical per Canadian copyright law. Changing the clef from one to another is just like changing the font from one to another, which in Canada is considered the prototypical mechanical change.
Maybe you don't like modern clefs, but by no means are they any sort of "original" work by the standards of copyright law in any country. (Even in the small handful of countries that recognize typographical arrangements/engravings per se as copyrightable in themselves, like the UK, changing the clefs used is not considered original in any way.)
Pure transposition, by the way, is also not considered an original copyrightable creative change.
I think you have focused in on the wrong aspect entirely from the musical standpoint... the purpose of any of these editions is not to be a facsimile of some existing document (facsimiles of autograph manuscripts exist), but really just to be critical editions taking into account a number of sources and intending to establish the work as it is in a certain state (generally, an early state) according to certain editorial principles, rather than reflecting the editor's personal creative opinions on how the work should be interpreted.
As for the fingerings provided in some critical editions, these are not really relevant, because they are clearly marked (when applicable) as separate from the text itself, and they can easily be redacted (as we need to do sometimes) or ignored. By the same token, the preface or editorial footnotes in these editions are separate from the presented musical object — do you believe a preface or footnotes somehow makes the thing provided in the same pages indescribable?
Thanks for your detailed answer! I guess I'm just used to critical editions in poetry, which are supposed to be identical to a facsimile but without transparencies nor coffee stains. The critical comments and the text are separated in odd/even pages. The even pages have a lot of notes, and are sometimes longer than the actual text! They explain the history of a single comma along the several editions of the poem in question, etc. I always hoped that musical urtexts would be like that, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Fortunately, we have IMSLP where we can at least see most of the originals nowadays!
> IMSLP is great for finding quick scores of random stuff, but the editions are often pretty shoddy, like either super outdated with weird editorial decisions that no one's agreed with for the last 50 years, or someone's totally amateur transcription full of errors and equally weird decisions.
You picked my interest.
- what makes an "edition" ("score"?) outdated?
- can you give examples for a weird editorial decision, maybe by additionally providing an alternative good editorial version?
- what happened that something deemed correct (?) over 50 years ago is nowadays something no one agrees with?
In the last decades philological standards for reproducing the original form of a musical work taking into account historical musical traditions, composing and performance practices have become much more thorough. Editions from the 19th and early 20th century which you can find on IMSLP because they are out of copyright restrictions often don't meet these scholarly standards. They very often reflect performance practises and the style of their time. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtext_edition.
I’d add that some of the older texts are really badly laid out - often handwritten or in a strange typeface that makes them really hard to mentally parse when you‘re used to the uniformity of modern scores.
That said imslp is still a life-saver and playing music would be a lot more painful (and expensive!) without it
To give an example to further illustrate answers you've received. In the 1800s it was common to produce heavily editorialized volumes of Bach, Scarlatti and other baroque keyboard works, with tempo and dynamic indications, written-out ornamentation, phrasing and articulation marks, pedalling, and other directions that would have been a relatively alien language in the actual autograph and early editions. These were much more reflective of (romantic) performance practices of the day than of the original period. While much of it could be taken as potentially interesting suggestion about interpretation on modern instruments, it gets hopelessly muddled when the score fails to distinguish between what content is the editors' vs. the composer's, as they so often do. Something like this of Bach's C major prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1, shows basically all the different kinds of unwanted editorializing I described: https://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP05948-WTC_Mugellini_No._1-12...
A modern Urtext edition would also include detailed information about which manuscript and early edition sources it was prepared from, and any unresolved or variant readings between these sources, with performance suggestions (apart sometimes from fingerings) relegated to supplementary notes that are clearly written by the editors and not the composer.
I don't presume to know what they meant, but as an example of something I think fits the bill, I downloaded "Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home" and the lyrics are full of a certain type of phonetic transliteration from vernacular Afro-American English (as if it's a foreign language or something) the likes of which you would probably never see today (e.g. lots of "dat" and "dey" and "throw'd" and "de whole day" and so on).
