The semantics of editorial fingering

Dear Anne and Justin:

Fingering annotations are typically sparse in editorial scores. This is the case even in pedagogical works intended for beginners. Editors understandably do not want to clutter their scores with unnecessary information. However, this state of affairs makes it difficult to leverage editorial scores as sources of fingering data suitable for training and evaluating computational models.

This raises a number of questions for me.

What is the intent of the editor? Is it to provide complete guidance in a compact format, as appears to be the case in beginner scores? (I remember being puzzled and a little irritated by the missing annotations. Why did I have to interpolate when I don't know what I am doing?!) Or is it to convey major transitions only (hand repositionings) and leave other "minor" decisions to the performer? Or is it to provide advice only in areas of special difficulty and to leave the rest to the performer's discretion? Or is it a combination of these intents, with the emphasis varying over the length of a piece?

How much do you think two pianists would agree when transforming a typical sparsely annotated score into a completely annotated score? Would this vary by editorial intent? (We have data we could use to tease out some answers here, I think. In the WTC corpus, we should have complete human data overlapping sparse editorial data that agree on the notes marked by the editor.)

Are there rules you apply to "fill in the blanks" in editorial scores? Are such rules discussed or codified in the pedagogical literature? Would doing so constitute a potential contribution to the pedagogical literature? Is this something you would like to pursue on its own merits?

Some time ago, I tried to brainstorm on this topic. ("MDC"--Manual Data Collector--is what I originally called the abcDE editor.)

Filling in the blanks would definitely be in order to augment our training data for machine learning. But the existence of blanks is also cramping my style in validating my latest novel evaluation metric. (It involves clustering fingering advice according to how "close" the individual fingering suggestions are to each other. This idea of closeness, already somewhat controversial, is even more strained when the suggestions are riddled with blanks.)