About Us
Our History
Performer's Edition was founded in 2008 after a series of orchestral rehearsals that consisted of constant questions such as "Where's your N? Mine is here." and "Do you have measure numbers?". This was quickly followed by the panicked flailing of bows in the string section as each section had a page turn in the midst of an exposed passage of 16th notes in a particularly bad edition of a work.
Based on those experiences, Performer's Edition was founded to provide modern, easy to read editions of standard classical works, as well as select new releases. Our philosophy is that the music we play from should be designed with the performer in mind and make it easy for the performer to read and rehearse the music so you can focus on performing.
In 2010, we introduced Performer's Reprints in partnership with IMSLP. These reprints of scanned historic parts and scores provide you with access to thousands of works, whether well known or obscure and out of print, at extremely low prices. This was followed in 2019 by the launch of Performer's Records to provide an outlet for recordings of new works by select contemporary composers as well as recordings of lesser known works.
Performer's Editions
All of our editions feature clean, modern typesetting of the music. Parts and scores are created from scratch for each edition - none of our editions are reprints or scans of historical parts.
We use a variety of source materials to research our editions, including first editions and composer's manuscripts whenever available. When editing the parts, we believe in minimizing extraneous markings and avoid adding our own interpretation. Fingerings, bowings, and other articulation marks are left to the performer as part of their interpretation.
Our parts and scores feature a number of consistent features:
- Measure numbers in all parts and scores for easier rehearsals
- Customary rehearsal numbers and letters in all parts and scores
- Logically designed page turns for easier performance
- English translations of non-standard markings, as well as many markings not in the traditional Italian
Additionally, only Performer's Edition offers an Accuracy Guarantee which replaces your printed music if you find a notation error.
Performer's Reprints
Our Performer's Reprints are created in conjunction with the International Music Score Library Project. Each of these publications is a reprint of a scanned copy of historic editions that have entered the public domain. Through this program, we are able to provide you with access to obscure and rare titles at a very reasonable cost.
As these documents are scans of historic documents, it is important to realize that there will be occasions where the original documents may have blemishes, markings, fading, yellowing, or edges that are partially obscured, which cannot be corrected by our systems. We do, however, work to straighten scans, crop out unnecessary white space, and layout existing pages for effective page turns. Other corrections to parts, such as restoring missing notes, correcting misprints, adding measure numbers, and other items are not possible. Thus, our accuracy guarantees for Performer's Editions are not applicable to Performer's Reprints.
Performer's Records
Performer's Records was founded to create an outlet for works by select living composers as well as creating an opportunity for performers of lesser known works to make their work more accessible to the public.