Inside the Detail-Obsessed, Essential World of Music Editing

New York Times

11-03-2025

Editors of contemporary classical music are used to describing what they do through metaphors and comparisons.
'I suppose you could say I was like a midwife bringing musical children into the world,' said Sally Cox, a former editor at the publisher Boosey & Hawkes.
'What happens when Lady Gaga drops a record, and there are, like, 12 writers credited on it, where one guy simply massaged a synthesizer?' asked the freelance editor Ash Mistry. 'Isn't this like the same thing?'
Not quite, but that's a useful starting point. Just as we can understand Lady Gaga's music as hers while acknowledging the many musical hands involved in its conception, so too can contemporary composition — at least the kind produced through major publishers — be understood as simultaneously the work of a sole composer and a product of group labor.
Among those laborers — performers most visibly, but also commissioners, programmers and publishers — there are music editors, people who prepare manuscripts for performance. It's a role away from the spotlight and rarely explored. 'People don't realize or don't think about how the music gets onto their stand,' Cox said.
This is true even for composers. 'When someone says, 'What does an editor do?,' we tend to say, 'We save the composer from themselves,'' said Elaine Gould, a former editor at Faber Music. 'That can sound very arrogant, but quite often a lot of them have no idea how much we do.'
LIKE A PAGE-TURNER for a pianist or a sheet music librarian, music editor is the kind of job that only the idiosyncratic structures of classical music can produce. It requires an extremely high aptitude with all aspects of notated music, an understanding of the intricate layers of this literate, visual tradition — not just of notes on a page, but also of how minute cosmetic changes to their appearance might fundamentally alter how those notes sound — and a strong working knowledge of all the strands of music-making that have sought to expand, critique and dismantle notational systems over the past century.
The work is extremely time-sensitive, to paces fast and slow. 'We're all familiar with the composer who, three weeks after the deadline, is madly rushing to finish the score and get the thing off, and others who are unfailingly six months ahead of schedule,' said Marc Dooley, a former head of new music at Edition Peters Group who oversaw composers as stylistically diverse as John Cage, Earle Brown and Brian Ferneyhough.
Gould — the former Faber editor whose book 'Behind Bars: The Definitive Guide to Music Notation' is an industry staple — said that she always worked 'on the assumption that the music is going to have to be sight-read in a hurry.' There is often less rehearsal time than a composer might need, especially at orchestras, so editors must make instrumental parts that are precise, legible and unproblematic on first read, no matter how complicated the material.
Editorial processes, Dooley said, are 'practically unique for each composer,' but they share a quality of trust between composer and editor. With Harrison Birtwistle, whom Cox spent much of her 47 years at Boosey editing, 'there were times when he got bored of answering questions and said, 'Oh, compose it yourself.'' (Birtwistle, who died in 2022, lives on through Cox's uncanny impersonation of his gruff Lancastrian accent.)
Music editing often attracts composers — Cox studied as a composer before working at Boosey — but also those with a passion for design. Gould, who edited composers including George Benjamin, Thomas Adès and Oliver Knussen before she retired in 2022, started out in calligraphy.
Most clearly, though, editorship attracts the fastidious. 'We obsess,' Mistry said, 'about paper sizes — the difference between ISOB4 and JISB4.'
THE ESSENCE OF AN EDITOR'S ROLE, Gould said, is in 'scrutinizing everything.' Once a manuscript is delivered, an editor embarks on a thorough investigation of the musical notation, then returns to the composer with questions. Mistry, who works regularly with Julia Wolfe and Edmund Finnis, edited Kevin Puts's 2011 opera 'Silent Night' and estimated there were about 500 notational queries across its two acts.
Editing involves separating music into its different constituent parts — rhythms, keys, chords, speeds, articulations, dynamics — analyzing them in turn, then in context, and looking out for inconsistencies of expression.
One key concern is musical spelling. A C major triad can be 'spelled' different ways and sound the same: It might be a B sharp triad, for example, or a D double flat triad. But if the music is in C major, the key is C major and the music around it is related to C major, then spelling the triad in C major would probably make the most sense.
In tonal music, the process of scrutinizing might be time-consuming but pretty straightforward, because it's predicated on notational conventions that have been broadly agreed upon for 500 years.
But in the 20th century, there was a radical expansion of musical notation's possibilities. That developed through wildly different strands. To name just a few: a transfer of the serial traditions developed by Arnold Schoenberg into all aspects of the musical work by composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, necessitating hyper-specific notation; Gyorgy Ligeti's use of similarly specific notation to explore texture and timbre; the liberalization and critique of notation in the music of John Cage; the potential for color, graphics and other visual aspects to play a key role in scores by George Crumb.
The role of the music editor, Mistry said, is to 'change the grammar but never the words.' Editors are keen to stress the differences from editors of books, who might have a much more involved role in aspects like large-scale structure and assume that grammatical details might be left to their authors or a proofreader further down the line.
It's completely the opposite in music, Dooley said. 'The idea of me taking a Brian Ferneyhough score and saying, 'Hey Brian, I think your concept of the brokenness of time doesn't work' — that's ridiculous,' he added. 'That conversation wouldn't happen.' (It's important to note, however, that historically speaking, such conversations have happened. Edward Elgar, for example, reworked significant parts of famous works like the 'Enigma Variations' and 'The Dream of Gerontius' after encouragement from August Jaeger, his publisher, editor and friend.)
Being a musical grammarian is an extremely subtle job, but understanding what that grammar looks like in a diffuse landscape is fiendishly complicated. One widely celebrated attempt to create a practical guide for editors, composers and performers is Gould's 'Behind Bars,' published in 2011. At over 700 pages, it's a testament to just how much the grammar of written music has diversified, especially since World War II.
The level of detail is immense: Over seven chapters in the middle of the book, 'Behind Bars' consolidates the 'standard' idiomatic writing for all the instruments of the Western orchestra, featuring entries on notating speaking through an instrument, note clusters — for works after Henry Cowell that require the performer to play a piano with forearms — and how best to ask harpists to strike their instruments with their knuckles. Earlier, there are 18 pages on the various ways to beam two or more notes together.
Mistry described 'Behind Bars' as 'a guiding light.' Simon Rattle, writing in the book's foreword, 'prayed that it would become a kind of Holy Writ for notation this century.' It's become something of a sacred text, to be referred back to, throughout the industry. And though in essence a practical guide rather than a rule book, it does confirm a fundamental distinction: Although the composer's job is to search, the editor's job is to consolidate, simplify and find consistency. ('The music engraver's job is to essentially be conservative,' Mistry said.) For younger composers, the book serves as a reminder that musical rules have been broken and mended many times before.
'BEHIND BARS' OPENS with a question: 'In an age where computers can do it all for us, what need is there for expertise in, or even a working knowledge of, the principles of notation?' In a tradition that has rarely changed, the advent of computerized software — Sibelius, the industry leader, began in 1993 — has fundamentally changed how music is edited. Only a handful of the composers who work with the editors in this article still submit handwritten manuscripts.
Computerization had multiple effects. It automated a lot of the more laborious and error-prone aspects of the music-copying process, and handed the means of editing and presenting a score — with legible parts and a consistent house style — to composers outside the world of mainstream music publishing.
Has, as Mistry contends, such softwares 'flattened the engraving landscape?' Certainly there's been a shift in the balance, from music notation as a route to expression toward a celebration of it as a visual style in itself. It's reflected in online composer culture: Of late, the X account Music Notation Is Beautiful and the YouTube channel Score Follower, for example, have gained popularity as much for their celebration of the cosmetic as the sonic.
But dig a little deeper into these worlds and you see a familiar pattern of stylistic rules, broken, negotiated, then consolidated — before cycling back to the start, just as it's been for hundreds of years.