Bernard de Bury (1720–1785) enjoyed considerable success as a composer of stage music in mid-eighteenth-century France. He left a small legacy of about twenty harpsichord pieces, published during his youth, in 1736 or 1737, as the Premier livre de pieces de clavecin. Bury held various positions during his career, including the much-coveted post of the ordinaire de la musique de la chambre du roi pour le clavecin, previously held by Marguérite-Antoinette and François Couperin, Jean-Henri D'Anglebert and Jacques Champion de Chambonnières. Reviving the harpsichord music of Bury, whose name remains obscure to the present day, therefore requires little justification.
Interest in Bury's harpsichord music appears to have dwindled after its first publication. The four suites in this volume, dedicated to his teacher François Collin de Blamont (1690–1760), reflect a mixture of older and newer styles. To date, only one surviving exemplar of Bury's original print has been identified, which is housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. A facsimile was released by Minkoff in 1982, and it is this reprint on which Bloomfield's current edition is based. Bloomfield is thus the first person to present Bury's harpsichord collection in a modern critical edition.
Bloomfield's edition contains Bury's four harpsichord suites in their original disposition, preceded by a Preface that covers much ground intelligently. The ancillary information at the end of the volume includes all of the expected materials: information on the original source, a translation of Bury's dedication, an explanation of the editorial procedure and a critical report, as well as a glossary of French words and titles. One would imagine that preparing a modern edition based on a single authoritative printed source should be a straightforward process. A close look at Bloomfield's editorial procedure, however, reveals that such a project can still be fraught with thorny issues.
On the plus side, most harpsichordists nowadays will readily welcome Bloomfield's decision to modernize clefs – Bury's original version with seven different clefs is replaced by an elegant, modern version using the familiar treble and bass clefs. The editor shows conscientiousness in the placement of ornaments and articulation symbols. On the whole the modern text is easier to read, and several mistakes – mainly concerning notes and ornaments – are corrected and duly recorded in the Critical Report. The vertical alignment of notes is meticulously reproduced, as in the ‘Double du 2e. Rondeau’ of the Troisième Suite (44), in which the last quavers in the upper stave in bars 1 and 3 are placed directly above the last semiquavers in the lower stave (as in Bury's original version), reminding players of the flexible value of dotted notes at the time. In this respect, Bloomfield is to be credited for making Bury's harpsichord music accessible to modern players in a clear, legible format.
Despite the usefulness of this edition, however, its value for ‘academic study or musical performance’ (v) has been greatly undermined by some of Bloomfield's editorial decisions. The first is the beaming of notes, which affects many pieces in this edition. In her editorial procedure, the editor simply states that beaming ‘has been changed to conform to modern practices’ (66), without further clarification. In modern critical editions of keyboard music, stemming is frequently modernized, as modernizing clefs makes retaining the original layout and stemming unviable much of the time. However, the original beaming is often retained, as it may have relevance for crucial issues such as phrasing and articulation. The decision to change the beaming at will, especially as it has been done ‘silently’, means that information on the original beaming is lost once and for all, not even appearing in the critical report that painstakingly registers all of the changes of clefs. ‘La Minerve’ of the Première Suite is a case in point. In bar 5 the four quavers in both staves are beamed differently in Bury's original version. In the upper stave, there is one beam joining the four quaver notes, but in the lower stave, the quavers are beamed in pairs. By normalizing the beaming – as in Bloomfield's edition, where the four quavers are joined by one single beam in both staves – possible nuances of touch or rhythmic rendition are hidden from the modern performer. In the upper stave of bar 11, changing Bury's original beaming of four quavers (that is, one beam joining four quavers) and then two quavers into six quavers beamed together obscures the hemiola effect in bars 11–12. Likewise, the variety of beaming in Bury's original text has all but vanished in many pieces (for example, ‘Le Tendre Agitation’ from the Première Suite) in the current edition.
Another seemingly unwary editorial policy adopted by Bloomfield is to remove apparently superfluous rests, again without comment. For me, this is less of an offence than changing the beaming at will. However, removing rests sometimes does have a certain impact on the visual appearance of the pieces. In the opening bar of the Loure from the Troisième Suite, the texture appears richer in Bury's original version. By removing the ‘superfluous’ rests and by combining the upper and lower stems of the right-hand chord into one stem, the music immediately assumes a homophonic layout. For a critical edition, the editor has the right, if not the obligation, to engage with the musical text and make emendations or revisions if he or she is convinced that such changes are desirable. However, such changes should be clearly recorded and made known to the player, either in a footnote or in the commentary. It is unfortunate that Bloomfield has chosen the antiquated approach of effecting these changes ‘silently’.
The silent reduction of chords polyphonically presented as two voices in Bury's music to chords with single stems (for example, ‘L'Enfantine’ from the Deuxième Suite, bar 1) is particularly regrettable given that this music often expands into a richer texture at cadences, a flexible approach to texture common in French harpsichord music of the time. No less problematic, for different reasons, is ‘Les Amusemens’ of the Troisième Suite, in which the dotted crotchets in bars 37–41 (one symbol each) are silently renotated as quavers tied to crotchets (three symbols). Again, it would have been helpful if such changes could have been made known to the player.
Another worry I have is that such silent editorial actions as those discussed above are not applied consistently across the entire edition. ‘Superfluous’ rests are not always removed, and beamings and stemmings sometimes follow Bury's own practice and are not changed to suit modern convention. What results is a mix of styles without recourse for the player to trace back what has been changed, making this edition less useful for serious academic study.
Bloomfield is to be commended for re-establishing Bury's text and correcting a number of wrong notes and misplaced ornaments, which are noted in the Critical Report. Nevertheless, the entire edition would have benefitted from another round of proofreading to eliminate a few irritating inconsistencies. In the first rondeau of ‘Le Plaidoyer de Cithère’ from the Première Suite, nine stems out of twelve of the dotted crotchets in the left hand have been inadvertently turned the wrong way up. These stems overlap with the quaver stems in the upper voice, visually transforming the dotted crotchets into dotted quavers. This is almost certainly an oversight, as all of these notes are correctly presented in the online analysis on the author's own website <www.rutabloomfield.com> (16 March 2016). In bar 15 of the Sarabande ‘La *** ou les Sentimens’, the stem of the first bass note (E[flat]) is also wrongly flipped, but the result here is less catastrophic because only one voice is involved.
The ‘Glosssary of French Words and Titles’ (64–65) may be of use to players with a limited background in French or French music. However, the definitions provided are rudimentary and are sometimes not helpful to anybody. To describe the chaconne, the loure and the sarabande indistinguishably as ‘types of form’ seems to serve no particular purpose. Unfortunately, the French word ‘croches’ (in the first item in the glossary list, meaning quavers) is incorrectly translated as ‘sixteenth notes’ (semiquavers).
This review has pointed out some of the pitfalls the modern editor may face in preparing a critical edition, particularly if the expectation is that scholars and performers will use the edition as a tool to enter into a meaningful dialogue with the composer. In the case of Bury, the user can fortunately freely download the facsimile of the original print from Gallica, the online library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (<http://gallica.bnf.fr>), and mark on the score the original beaming and other essential information to arrive at their own conclusions about how the music ought to be rendered.
