Sources and dates

What the desk reads

The material behind these entries is documentary. It includes archived pages of a composer's own site from 2001 to 2003, printed and online programs, catalogues that list works and forces, discography pages, and reference works that place a composition or a performer in a tradition. Each entry names what was read at the foot of the page.

How to read a date

A date can belong to a work, a performance, a recording or a publication, and the four are not the same. This dossier writes the date the desk can support: the year of a printed program, the year a page was archived, the year a catalogue listed a work. Where a page survives only as an archive copy, the entry gives the archive year and treats it as the date of the document, not of the event.

What an archive copy can and cannot show

An archive copy keeps the words of a page, its links and its order. It does not keep a performance, a hall's acoustics or a player's sound. A reader who wants the music itself has to go to a recording or a concert, and the dossier says which of the two the entry is built on.

What you can check

Every entry lists its sources with their addresses, so a reader can open the same page and compare. A correction that names a page, a year and a line is read and applied, and the entry carries the new date when it changes. That is the whole method: read, name, date, and revise when the source moves.