Contemplating E-Scores: Open Ruminations on the E-Score, the Patron, the Library, and the Publisher

For several years now, libraries, publishers, and vendors have worked out a means of creating, licensing, and delivering e-books in academic settings. While the art of the academic e-book is perhaps not quite yet perfected, conservatively speaking, today’s students and faculty will find and use at least one e-book in the course of their academic career and be more or less satisfied with the experience. E-scores, however, are only now coming to occupy the attention of librarians and not a moment too soon as commercial e-score vendors with subpar quality content manage to meet the functionality needs of most users. Many living composers are harnessing the Internet and cutting out the middle man by offering e-scores in the form of downloadable PDFs. Score publishers are, by and large, still in the early stages of thinking about moving to escore format (also for personal downloads), and vendors with e-score platforms are negligible. This paper opened the conversation about e-scores to acquisition librarians, e-book publishers, and vendors who typically work outside the music library. The first half of this paper provides an overview of the current state of e-scores in academic libraries, including what patrons want from e-scores, what score publishers are doing, what libraries are currently able to provide, and, finally, what commercial vendors are already doing. The final portion of the paper briefly reviews responses from the conference session audience. Through this open questioning, it is hoped that readers will come to new understandings of their own work with other electronic materials, while at the same time bring their expertise to bear on the future of e-score development. There are a host of differences between music libraries and general academic libraries, but for the purposes of this paper let us focus on the differences in how musical readings are used compared to readings in most other disciplines. For nonmusic disciplines, words are the primary means of conveying information. While anyone writing about music certainly uses words, anyone writing music, reading music, and performing music uses musical annotations and the musical score to convey information. Another difference is in how we use the musical score. We analyze it, we write in our own fingerings, we change bowings, we add other visual cues, and all of this we write directly into the score. We do this because looking at a musical score is rarely a oneoff occurrence. We read and reread a score from start to finish a thousand times, dissect it into the tiniest fragments until the music is ingrained in our mind, in our fingers, and, I am sure some would say, in our souls. In short, a student musician’s typical interaction with a score is far more active than a student’s typical interaction with a book. This is expected behavior, and only the most naive music librarian will expect students to return scores to the library in pristine condition after their jury or senior recital. It is this very personal interaction with the score that I suspect is responsible for the music score’s slow entree into the digital realm. With the rise of digital humanities and completely digital generations now becoming consumers of these scores, things are changing, and they are changing in a way that libraries need to be attending to. Let us begin by taking a look at what critically viable editions are out there for e-scores, and by critically viable I mean good editions with established editorial guidelines. This will be followed by an examination of what active musicians actually want and are using. The online world is certainly not a complete wash for critical musical score editions. In fact, there are quite a large number of extremely important critical editions available online, including the Digital Mozart Edition/Neue Mozart Ausgabe Online, Chopin’s First Editions Online, The Chopin Variorum Edition, and the Web Library of