Kritische Apparate als Entscheidungskorpora: Ein Verfahren zur quantitativ gestützten Analyse editorischer Entscheidungen in der Musikphilologie

Abstract

This article proposes a method for treating critical reports and lists of variants in historical-critical music editions as corpora of documented editorial decisions. Drawing on research in the field of Judgment and Decision Making, particularly on bounded rationality and heuristics, it asks whether recurring patterns can be identified in decisions that otherwise appear to concern isolated cases. The method combines an inductively developed category system, rule-based and LLM-assisted pre-classification, manual validation, and quantitative analysis. It distinguishes the musical element concerned, the trigger for intervention, the stated reasoning, the editorial strategy, and the formal outcome. The method is tested on several apparatus entries from seven works in volume III,1 of the Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (‘New Schubert Edition’). The pilot study shows clear differences between works and decision types, a high proportion of entries without explicit justification, and a strong concentration of analogy-based interventions. These findings suggest that editorial guidelines and routines can function as institutionalized heuristics, while also underlining that the analysis remains limited to decisions documented in the apparatus.