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.
