WRITING ABOUT MUSIC: A STYLE SHEET.
By D. Kern Holoman. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. 106 pp. Paperback. $12.95.
All of us under the new editorial policies at
Fanfare
were asked to read and absorb this book, but since I was chosen to review it I will do so.
Although Holoman tries to be entertaining at times, this isn’t a book for reading but a reference guide to correct terminologies and layouts within a music review. Some of it, like the
Fanfare
style sheet itself, contradicts earlier writing traditions on music I was raised on, most particularly in opera titles. Librettos, three-sheets, and most books before 1972 always had most words in an opera title capitalized:
Die Frau Ohne Schatten, La Forza del Destino, Così Fan Tutte, L’Enfant Prodigue.
Most librettos and a great many opera programs still follow this scheme, but we aren’t allowed to do so. French capitalizes titles through the first noun or proper noun, i.e.,
L’Enfant prodigue.
German capitalizes the first word and all nouns, Italian only the first word and all proper nouns. This inconsistent grammar change does indeed follow the rules of each language, but since we’re told not to use British spellings I’m not sure why what’s sauce for the Brits isn’t sauce for the French or Germans. I’m still not sure why we, as American writers, should use the German eszett (ß) instead of a much more readable double s, but I suppose they want it to look cool.
Much of this is probably in keeping with the
Chicago Manual of Style
, which I do rely on heavily (at least in English), but I’ve yet to discover who started, or when they started, the dumb idea of putting footnotes at the back of a book. As a reader, nothing irks me more than flipping through 200 pages to see what their cute little footnote refers to. When Gunther Schuller published his second treatise on jazz,
The Swing Era,
with Oxford Press in 1989, he was still putting his footnotes (sensibly) at the bottoms of the pages, but shortly after that they were all shipped to Endnote Hell. A pity.
One real problem with this sometimes confusing and conflicting “I before E except after C” approach is that it’s a book you have to keep referring to, over and over and over again, and not something that ever becomes second nature to a writer. I understand a need to standardize some procedures, but some make common sense and a lot do not. I’m still baffled as to how these people create sheet music examples in their books and articles; I certainly don’t have anything like that on
my
computer. It’s very difficult to learn, as indicated on page 13, chord and pitch class symbols if you don’t know what they mean. (I can name most chords unless you throw in a mode like a monkey wrench on me, in which case it’ll take me a minute or two to figure it out, but I’ll be darned if I know what an I 6/4 is or how you make your computer put the 6 on top of the 4, which is impossible for me to find in Word.) Nor am I going to learn the Gregorian vs. Julian calendars. I’m an American. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
One of the few new things I did like was putting Web site addresses in sans serif to make them stand out from the rest of the text. Great idea, D. Kern!
Lynn René Bayley
