The Mary Lou Williams Edition
The Mary Lou Williams Edition is meant to facilitate the study, encourage the performance and expand the knowledge of Mary Lou Williams’ music. It is also meant to bring insight to her work to a wide audience – musicians, researchers, students and music lovers.
This edition is intended to include every composition for which enough sources are available to establish a consistent text, from solo piano pieces to big band arrangements, symphonic arrangements to choral works, lead sheets to masses.
About The Edition
The Mary Lou Williams Edition is both a practical and critical edition.
As a practical edition, it is performer-friendly. Keeping in mind that Williams’ music should be kept alive – performed, absorbed, interpreted, transformed – each piece comes with performance material, professionally engraved and carefully edited to suit today’s performer needs.
As a critical edition, it comes with an apparatus that includes a foreword, statement of editorial methods, source evaluations, and detailed critical commentary. To establish the musical text, all available and known sources were meticulously analyzed (scores, parts, sketches, drafts, recordings), and editorial decisions were based on an understanding of the work’s writing process, its performance history, the composer’s methods, as well as its global esthetic context.
The Mary Lou Williams Edition presents many new discoveries made while researching and examining the sources to establish this edition.
Contents
The Mary Lou Williams Edition is organized in six different series, declined in 10 sub-series. Series are organized either by orchestration (Big Band, Small Group) or thematically (Zodiac Suite, Sacred Music). Sub-series are organized following the same principles, usually grouping pieces according to periods, orchestration or bands for which they were written.
Series I – Big Band Music
1. Compositions and arrangements for Andy Kirk (1929-1941)
2. Compositions and arrangements for Duke Ellington (1942-1967)
3. Big Band miscellanea (1938-1978)
Series II – Small Group Music
1. Instrumental and vocal pieces (1929-1957)
Series III – Zodiac Suite
1. Orchestral arrangements (1945-1946)
2. Piano and other arrangements (1945-1957)
Series IV – Sacred Music
1. Masses (1967-1971)
2. Individual pieces and other arrangements (1961-1971)
Series V – Piano Music
1. Selected piano pieces (1930-1978)
Series VI – Lead Sheets and Songs
1. The Mary Lou Williams Fake Book)