Inside the Detail-Obsessed, Essential World of Music Editing

Editors of contemporary classical music are used to describing what they do through metaphors and comparisons.

“I suppose you could say I was like a midwife bringing musical children into the world,” said Sally Cox, a former editor at the publisher Boosey & Hawkes.

“What happens when Lady Gaga drops a record, and there are, like, 12 writers credited on it, where one guy simply massaged a synthesizer?” asked the freelance editor Ash Mistry. “Isn’t this like the same thing?”

Not quite, but that’s a useful starting point. Just as we can understand Lady Gaga’s music as hers while acknowledging the many musical hands involved in its conception, so too can contemporary composition — at least the kind produced through major publishers — be understood as simultaneously the work of a sole composer and a product of group labor.

Among those laborers — performers most visibly, but also commissioners, programmers and publishers — there are music editors, people who prepare manuscripts for performance. It’s a role away from the spotlight and rarely explored. “People don’t realize or don’t think about how the music gets onto their stand,” Cox said.

This is true even for composers. “When someone says, ‘What does an editor do?,’ we tend to say, ‘We save the composer from themselves,’” said Elaine Gould, a former editor at Faber Music. “That can sound very arrogant, but quite often a lot of them have no idea how much we do.”