The price is wrong: How error-riddled scores get in the way of promoting music of marginalized composers

From the article:

Of all the marginalized composers who’ve yet to receive the acclaim they deserve—and there are many—Florence Price is perhaps the one closest to getting her flowers.

Dedicated work on Price has been happening since the 1970s without fanfare, with scholars like Barbara Garvey Jackson, Rae Linda Brown, and Helen Walker-Hill championing Price’s music. The 2009 discovery of forgotten manuscripts in a dilapidated home saved some of her works from historical obliteration and set the scene for the current Price revival. Grammy awards for best orchestral performance went to albums of Price’s music in both 2022 and 2023; a 2022 survey of 111 orchestras by Donne found that she was the most-performed woman composer worldwide.

When music publisher G. Schirmer announced, in 2018, that they had acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to Florence Price’s catalog, it seemed like a watershed moment for the composer’s legacy and the publisher’s reputation.
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With their recognizable covers—custard-yellow and leaf-bordered—and low price tags, Schirmer editions are ubiquitous in music studios around the world. (At the time of this writing, the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas from the respected Henle Verlag will set you back $151.90. Schirmer’s set is $39.99.)

Schirmer was perfectly positioned to be both beneficiary and savior in the Florence Price revival with the acquisition of Price’s catalog, which promised a flood of accessible editions of her music. Before 2018, people who wanted to perform Price’s music were generally faced with two choices: play only the handful of compositions available in purchasable form, or put in the legwork of hunting down manuscripts in one of the three American archives holding her music, then do all the copying and editing themselves. Schirmer’s celebratory press release announcing the acquisition painted visions of Price’s entire catalog available at a click, for Schirmer’s famously low prices.

But the dream of accessible, playable Florence Price sheet music has not materialized. I found inconsistent editing and sloppy engraving in Schirmer’s editions of Price’s piano works, and when I talked to other performers, it became clear my experience was a common one. Many people who had recently studied or performed her music had encountered errors, misprints, and bizarre editing at a level that most musicians go their entire careers without experiencing.