ABSTRACT
The modern edition is one of the most important means we use in order to approach the music of the past. This is especially true for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, since the ways in which music appears in the sources dating from these periods make it difficult, if not downright impossible, for us to access this music for study or performance. Just like those sources, however, modern editions are not “neutral” containers of musical artefacts, whose sole aim is to make available to their readers content that otherwise would not be accessible to them. Rather, they are complex and multifaceted media that not only contain the music they transmit, but also contribute to shaping its reception and ultimately its meaning for us. This chapter concentrates on the case of a modern edition of Renaissance music, Fors seulement: Thirty Compositions for Three and Five Voices or Instruments from the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, edited by Martin Picker and published in 1981 by A-R Editions. It focuses in particular on the material components and internal organisation of this publication, pondering their function as tools for the construction of an “unspoken,” or perhaps better, “unwritten” historical narrative about both the music contained in it and its original sources.
