ABSTRACT
Present practitioners of musical scholarship have gained fresh respect for source evaluation as an art, a central technical skill in discriminating the useful from the peripheral. In the last forty years, a flood of sources, even many that had been previously pored over, have undergone reexamination, revaluation, recategorization, and have then yielded fresh, sometimes startling data. We have learned about the stages of a work’s composition and performance, about its reception by audiences and critics, about its functions and reuses in late environs, about analysis then and now, and about innumerable ancillary details. Specific places in a work reveal themselves as problematical, often insoluble; sometimes we cannot divine the composer’s ultimate intention, though we can now come closer to that ideal than ever before.
