Urtext? More like "ur wrong" text

I want to start off by mentioning how much I enjoyed the definitions-based reading. The definitions are very lively and I would be interested in teaching my students definitions in a more upbeat fashion than how they more standardly appear. How much "seriousness" do we really need to have when teaching music to young students? Anyway, I appreciated the phrase "magic word" when used to describe urtext. There appears to be a debacle between scholars who are fine with adding measures of music to suit a certain musical purpose and those who want the completely unaltered version of a work in urtext. In fact, scholars who desire the absolute original markings of a composer aren't even willing to correct errors in the piece. But this raises the question, were those errors even errors? This argument could open up a whole can of worms and is very subjective, but I think I side with the purists on this one. I'm currently working on the first Brahms sonata on clarinet with Dr. Faria, and there are some very poorly placed breath marks that I'm sure Brahms did NOT include in his manuscript. Every conductor and musician is going to add their own individual "flair" on the piece they're performing, regardless of what the score might say.  Let's print what we see, and do our research/rely on our musicianship to do the rest.

In "Composer's Intent," I love to see that more historically "unconventional" works by composers like Schoenberg & Webern are being featured more in modern performances. I often see the Philadelphia Orchestra during their summer residencies at SPAC and in recent years have been doing the same thing by programming new works by underrepresented/new composers on the same programs that feature the "classics." This is the best way to expand the ears of audiences, as well as reach new ones by "reconfiguring the mindset." According to the article, criticizing a certain musical approach is "anti-musical," as we cannot define the true "right" or "wrong" ways to perform music. Essentially, we want music to move us in a way that words and other arts cannot and there is no precise way to do that. We need to interpret music in order to open the ears of others, and it's the interpretation that keeps the art form thriving. We really don't need to "obey" a composer's intentions and overanalyze their works. At the end of the day, they want their music heard by others and performed with beauty and meaning.

Reading "Urtext, que me veux-tu?" unveiled interesting perspectives on urtext and offered compelling arguments as to its validity (or lack thereof). Essentially, urtext isn't the end-all-be-all to music and does not necessarily reflect a composer's true intent. People love to make their own assumptions and take it upon themselves to "right the wrongs" (such as when a composer writes an error in their piece), but that doesn't need to happen-- not everything is black and white. My opinion is this: If a piece of music wholeheartedly reflects what was written in the original manuscript, print it as urtext. If it has any changes, even if it was by the composer themselves, it should not be urtext. Let the musicianship of performers and conductors prevail when making musical decisions while preparing a piece of music.