"Edition-ing" Rock

By Albin J. Zak III

When I first met Mark Clague, MUSA's executive editor at the time, he suggested that I consider formulating a proposal for MUSA that had something to do with my interest in rock music. It was about time, he declared, that MUSA put out a "rock edition." I responded with a blank look. The idea of these two entities, rock and edition, in a state of cohabitation felt doomed from the start. Because MUSA aims to represent the breadth of American musical culture, it seems logical that it should include rock. But how might an edition represent faithfully what I take to be the central ontological category for musical works in this idiom—that is, records? Rock records are wrought in sonic images; musicological editions preserve and transmit musical ideas, images, and instructions in writing. Whether these notational symbols originate with a composer or are transcribed from a performance, if we are to accept them as a reasonably accurate way of conveying both the music's syntactic elements and its spirit, then they must satisfy us as an iconic representation. It is up to the editor, after all, to use coded symbols that represent the work at hand in the fairest possible way.