Departing from the first musicological publication about eighteenth-century Brazilian music by Francisco Curt Lange in 1951 (Archivo de Música Religiosa de la "Capitania Geral das Minas Gerais"), other initiatives appeared in Brazil manifesting a wide range of editorial solutions. The study of the editions produced in this country in the last five decades reveals several dichotomies, ten of the most important being: 1) published work or informal circulation; 2) Gesamtausgaben or Denkmähler; 3) academic edition or interpretive edition; 4) sources from one or several collections; 5) isolated work or collective works; 6) individual work or team-work; 7) unpublished works or previously published works; 8) private funding or governmental funding; 9) scores only or scores and parts; 10) paper or digital/electronic publishing. Besides the identification of those dichotomies, the objective of this paper is to understand their meanings and relate them to the current editorial perspectives of early music in Brazil.
Brazilian early music; music edition; publishing dichotomies