Thanks for the comment. That sounds like a good system- the most important thing is not to get in your stand partner’s way with your markings. Thanks for reading!

There’s an old post here on the general subject of score marking
http://kennethwoods.net/blog1/2006/10/31/score-marking/ which somehow got picked up by Gramophone Magazine. As you can see, I’m a political independent on score marking- I do make quite a few analytical notes as I go along, and I often mark entrances because the layout on every page can be different. On one page the top line is flute, but the next page it might be oboe and another 2nd horn. Better safe that sorry, but I do keep clean copies of most standard rep because it is good to go back without preconceptions and think about a piece afresh.

K

On the other hand, I’m concerned, because, well, they were both batshit crazy

“When I was a child, I was profoundly mystified by the fact that most of the editions, even the best ones, in circulation at that time – Bischoff’s Bach, say or Schnabel’s Beethoven – contained, among other indulgences, fingerings. I would look at those fingerings, even try them out on occasion, and find that they rarely corresponded to what I had been doing or wanted to do. And I was always amazed that people were actually paid to sit there and add extraneous, perhaps erroneous (and in many cases mischievous) data to a fugue or a sonata.

Well, I still am, I can’t really get over it. For me, a fingering is something which springs spontaneously to mind when one looks at a score, and is altered, if at all, when a shift of emphasis alters the way of looking at the score.”

(from David Dubal’s “Reflections from the Keyboard,” p.180)

I had a roommate in my Mad years who returned a sonata to the Mills Music Library, with his teacher’s fingerings and bowings written all over it, unerased, because “they were right”. LooooooooooL. Good times.”

I suppose it depends on the cellist. If I’m preparing a piece properly, it’s certainly no problem. If I’m sightreading at some speed, I’m still likely be okay, but every once in a while, the sheer absurdity of some spurious marking will be enough to distract me. More worrying is the impact on young players, who don’t understand the difference between the information in their part that comes from the composer and that which comes from the editor. Better to teach them to problem solve than to spoon feed them possibly dubious solutions.