Musical Sources and Stemmatic Filiation: A Tool for Editing Music

Abstract

Ever since the philologist Karl Lachmann, in the last century, announced the startling results of his investigations into the texts of the New Testament and the Classical Latin poet Lucretius, textual critics have sought to apply his principle of common error to establish the genealogical relationships of the sources of a wide variety of texts.' Lachmann's method arose from the problem of dealing with a text that was central to the fabric of Western Civilization, the New Testament. In its witnesses, as in those of all texts, he found three types of readings: good readings, places where the witnesses offered variant reasonable readings, and clear errors. (The following discussion naturally pertains to both printed and manuscript sources. To avoid cumbersome locutions like scribal/ typographical, or scribe/typesetter/engraver, I have chosen to use scribe or scribal to stand for the various possibilities.) The