Reflecting on last Thursday’s History of Material Texts Seminar, given by John Rink from the Faculty of Music, brings me out in a fit of overblown adjectives. Rink has been at the helm of two extraordinary digitization projects, Chopin’s First Editions Online and The Online Chopin Variorum Edition. His talk took us through the bewildering profusion of different witnesses to Chopin’s scores–compositional drafts, presentation manuscripts, engravers’ manuscripts, proofs, multiple editions issued simultaneously in France, England and Germany–each of which might contain revisions–and printed copies marked up or elaborated by Chopin whilst he was teaching. That level of variability is an editor’s nightmare. (Even the celebrated ‘Funeral March’ from the Second Sonata was rethought and became a mere ‘March’ in some editions). But it’s meat and drink for a hypertext edition, which allows users to move between different versions, cross-compare, and put together their own text from the surviving evidence.

That said, the amount of work which goes into preparing such an edition–in terms not just of acquiring photographs of sufficient quality from archives across the world, but also of marking them up, bar-by-bar, so as to facilitate meaningful comparison between them–is prodigious. The results, though, are hugely worthwhile, since the application of new technologies raises fundamental questions about what a work of music actually is. Did this improvisational composer work towards a final, perfect goal, or did his pieces go on growing endlessly in different environments and different moments? How did publishers (including the women who actually engraved the music) go about regularizing and rationalizing Chopin’s sometimes idiosyncratic drafts? And how much license do performers today have in interpreting the textual evidence?

In questions, Rink suggested that it was fine for performers to pick and choose, in an informed way, from the different witnesses. He saw the quest for musical authenticity as often the enemy of important freedoms, imposing a rigid historicism on playing which in fact always takes place in the present. But he would presumably not condone re-opening Chopin to radical improvisation… How far should we go in our celebration of textual fluidity?