3 Creating new editions
If you are investing time in researching and learning new repertoire by women composers, you might want to consider creating a new performance edition, which will make it easier for you to perform from. Once you have created your own new performance edition, you might also want to consider making it available to other performers too.
Activity 2
Watch the following interview with Tim Parker-Langston discussing his work raising the profile of the music of Fanny Hensel, creating new performance editions of her songs, and making these available to other performers via Hensel Songs Online.
Transcript
TIM PARKER-LANGSTON
My name’s Tim Parker-Langston. I am a tenor singing [in] the chorus with the Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera Chorus. And alongside that I’ve been working on a PhD which I’ve just completed called ‘On the Songs of Fanny Hensel’ or Fanny Mendelsohn. And the project has been practice-centred and the idea being I wanted to create a methodology which put the dissemination and the creation of tangible resources and materials needed to address the gap of knowledge and the absence of nearly a third of Fanny Hensel’s nearly 250 songs from the concert hall. And Hensel Songs Online is that tangible output. It’s an online open-access resource which houses a complete performance edition of all 239 songs for solo voice and piano. The songs are hosted in a variety of keys. They should be accessible to any voice type. And it’s also possible to make requests of keys sent around that. The website also is a curated resource with playlists of available recordings of Fanny [Hensel] songs including several [that] have been made as a part of my doctoral work.
LAURA HAMER
Thank you, Tim. Could you tell us why did you choose to focus upon Fanny Hensel?
TIM PARKER-LANGSTON
I shamefully discovered Fanny Hensel not long before I decided to focus on her for my PhD and I think there was an element of it was that shock that someone who I’d quickly discovered had been revered and infamous within the world of women composers for nearly 40 years at the point of my research starting had never come across my awareness in a career training as a professional musician or in industry or in working. And that was paired with the fact that I just thought from very first instances of playing her songs that there was something very emotionally visceral, something that was distinct from any of the Lieder composers that were her contemporaries. I thought it was really fascinating how different her music and songs seemed to her brothers.
LAURA HAMER
Could you tell us about how you went about creating new editions of Hensel songs?
TIM PARKER-LANGSTON
It was possible to make the edition I made because of the fantastic archiving work that had been done by the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. And at the point that I started my research, I had very high-quality digital access to scans of all the autograph manuscripts [which] were hosted without any kind of paywall, without any issues of access. So I was able to create the editions in the way I chose to do it, which was very much not to take a kind of critical edition approach, but instead take an approach which was focused towards performers like me and a user-friendly experience of getting the songs in a format that was clear and easy to read, reliable, reflective of what was in the autograph, but also addressed some of the elements of the autographs that might make them hard. And then it really was a question of going song by song. The source that I would use would differ depending on certain types of songs. For example, [for] many, many songs it was quite simple because there was only one copy or one version extant. So it was simply a case of engaging with that autograph manuscript, best representing it in a way that was legible and clear and accurate. In other cases, there were more than one versions of songs. And so I had to make a decision about how I wanted to engage with that. I decided to go to [the] later dated manuscript in terms of the technical elements. I used Sibelius engraving software, which I’ve been using all of my kind of musical life since being in school and had become very familiar with at university. I created a sort of big first draft of them all and then spent a very long period of time just playing through all of the songs again and again, finding errors in errata and correcting those as I went through, but also by doing so, really getting to know her music. And then at the end of that process, I had 239 PDFs in the original keys and about the same again, two or three times in different keys ready to create a website from.
LAURA HAMER
And what motivated you to make your editions available as open access for other performers?
TIM PARKER-LANGSTON
I found it quite aggravating, frustrating that I could encounter analyses or writing about songs that I couldn’t see in a score or hear. So I wanted to create something that would kind of like irrevocably take [that] away. I didn’t want another PhD or another book to start with, though many of her songs have not yet been published or performed, actually to be able to go, right, let’s just get past that point. And the reason it’s open access is because, you know, they’re not my songs, they’re hers.
LAURA HAMER
Thank you, Tim. Thank you so much for sharing your experience of the Hensel songs online and some knowledge from that project with us.
TIM PARKER-LANGSTON
Pleasure.
Then consider the following questions:
- Why did Tim choose to focus on Fanny Hensel.
- How has Tim gone about this work?
Discussion
- Tim describes himself as ‘shamedly’ discovering Fanny Hensel just before embarking on his PhD and reflects on the shock of this, given his training and professional experience as a singer. (You might have found that his comments resonated with your own experiences, which you reflected on at the start of Week 1.) He also shares that he chose to focus on Hensel because he found her music emotionally visceral, distinct from her contemporaries, and was particularly struck by how different it was to that of her brother’s (Felix Mendelssohn).
- Tim explains that he used the high-quality scans of Hensel’s manuscript songs which the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin had already made available online. He focused on producing practical performance editions which would be clear, easy to read, and user-friendly by removing the elements that a modern musician might find it difficult to read from. He then used Sibelius engraving software to create PDFs (including versions in different keys), which are hosted on Hensel Songs Online.
For another excellent online resource dedicated to Fanny Hensel, see Hensel Pushers.