I received a nice email from Eugene Gaub, a music professor at Grinnell. In my response to him, I outlined my current thinking on the minimal annotation in edited scores. Here it is so I don't lose track of it. . . .
Actually, we just started seriously looking at how completely "determined" or "specified" a given passage is, given the apparently sparse annotations included in the score. I wonder if there are standard conventions for how to decide when to include an annotation and how much variability there is among editors and composers. Would you be able to point me to any good pedagogical sources that might talk about this?
I am actually only a beginning pianist (and to say even this is an insult to beginning pianists everywhere), and I have been struck by how few numbers appear on an exercise, yet the fingerings are in fact unambiguously specified--given an implied "next-note-next-finger" convention. But as you describe, I have often experienced the desire to have more numbers on the page, to be sure.
We plan to explore the notion of optimal verbosity of annotations, perhaps for varying skill levels or familiarity with a given piece. Given a "fully determined" set of fingerings, I envision a sort of verbosity knob where we display just the right number of numbers. Measuring intrinsic "optimality" in this context might pose a special challenge. But we could do some usability testing with actual pianists if push came to shove. The more I think about this, the more I like it as a related sub-project.
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