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What They've Done To Your Song: Textual Editing and Recorded Music

Who "edits" popular music? I don't mean the preparation of musical scores, but the editing that happens to the popular music we hear, whenever that music is reissued, on compact disc or as a digital file; editing that is done by the commercial entities that have the legal right to issue those recordings. And I also don't mean what an artist or a recording engineer might mean by "editing" -- that is, "shortening" the recording. I am suggesting a parallel between critically editing classic literature and the reissuing of music that originally appeared in a different format. This kind of editing is typically done silently and is under-theorized; while the editing of literary texts is at least sometimes done "transparently" and has a large and contentious body of theorizing behind it. Recordings are not exactly texts (whatever texts are!); but I think the remastering and reissuing of recordings is editing, in the literary-critical sense: all...
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