Manuel M. Ponce Forever. Integral Edition of His Work

BACKGROUND
Because of his vast and important production, Manuel María Ponce (1882-1948) has been one of the most prolific and appreciated figures in Mexico’s musical life and therefore occupies a privileged place. He ventured into most genres and practically all musical forms, as we can see through his extensive list of works. During 50 years after his death, his works remained in his own home, and for the first four years, they were guarded and promoted by his widow, Clementina Maurel. However, due to health reasons, she expressed her wish that this labor be continued by Ponce’s former disciple and later heir, the pianist Carlos Vázquez, who carried out a thorough revision of the extensive musical collection, consisting of manuscripts and first editions of the works. In 1998, he decided to donate it to UNAM’s National School of Music, as it was called at the time. Since then, it has been kept in the reserved collection of the Cuicamatini Library of today’s Faculty of Music (FaM). Once the FaM received such an important legacy, it also assumed the commitment to order, classify, preserve, and disseminate it.

A fundamental part of this task has been publishing Ponce’s work. At the end of 1998, the Manuel M. Ponce Editorial Project was born, with the objective of offering a critical edition of one of the most emblematic and important Mexican composers’ works.

THE PROJECT
In order to appreciate the importance of the edition, it is appropriate to remember that during Ponce’s lifetime, a large number of his compositions was published, both in Mexico and abroad. Among the foreign publishing houses, the following ones stand out: Bongiovanni (Bologna, Italy), J. Giralt e Hijo (Havana, Cuba), Anselmo López (Havana, Cuba), Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Mendoza, Argentina), Schott (Mainz, Germany), Maurice Senart (Paris, France), Schirmer (New York, United States) and Cooperativa Interamericana de Compositores (Montevideo, Uruguay). Among the national publishing houses, there were essentially five: Adolfo de la Peña Gil, Enrique Munguía, Otto y Arzoz, Wagner y Levien, and Casa Alemana de Música. After the composer’s death, some more of his works were printed in Ediciones Clema M. de Ponce, thanks to the efforts of the composer’s widow.

However, except for his works for guitar, which were widely promoted and disseminated by his colleague, the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, almost all of his published works have been out of print for decades and were never reprinted, as several of the publishing houses disappeared, and those that survived stopped publishing. Peer International Corp. (today Peer Music Classical) started to publish Ponce’s work after his death and continues distributing some of his musical scores today. Nevertheless, there are still manuscripts that have never been published.

Faced with this outlook, we can better understand the significance of the Manuel M. Ponce Editorial Project, whose objective of republishing the composer’s works is also linked to the importance of disseminating Mexican music.

OBJECTIVES ACHIEVED
The fundamental objective of this project has been to provide a critical edition that follows current editorial norms related to musical works publishing. The ultimate goal is to offer students, professors, researchers, and performers, musical scores loyal to the original manuscripts and first editions, reliable for their study and containing general information for guidance and orientation.

The prefaces of the first scores were published only in Spanish; a couple of them translated into English, as was the initial intention of the project. Since 2008, all the titles that have been published include texts—preface and critical notes—in both languages.

In 2002, the project became part of the “Permanent Seminars of Academic Improvement,” including the participation of professors from different places in Mexico, Spain, and Belgium. In 2006, the project joined social service activities for students of the bachelor’s degrees in Composition and Piano with the program “Review and/or Digitalization of Scores to be published as part of the Manuel M. Ponce Editorial Project”.

In 2010, Ponce’s collection of autograph manuscripts, the fundamental basis of our publications, was inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register-Mexico, whose certificate establishes: “For the exceptional value and interest that this collection represents for the documentary heritage of humanity.” In April 2023, the FaM, through our project and the Andrés Segovia Music Documentation Center Foundation in Linares, Spain, signed a co-edition contract to publish some of Ponce’s manuscripts stored in that institution, which the composer’s section at the reserved collection of our library does not include.

PONCE’S COMPLETE PIANO WORKS RECORDING
Since 2010 we have been in contact with Master Álvaro Cendoya, resident in San Sebastián, Spain, to whom we have sent the scores we have edited and digital versions of the piano works of the Ponce Collection whose publications are out of print; we have also sent him texts with biographical and general historical information. Thus, we provided Cendoya with material and data about the composer that have been useful (and will continue to be) in the recording of Ponce’s complete works for this instrument, made on the Naxos record label (Ponce, Complete Piano Works), in the Grand Piano series. The author of this lines was invited to write the notes for the records that are being made. The fourth installment of this eightalbum collection will soon be released. This is the first complete piano works recording of Ponce’s made outside of Mexico by a foreign performer. It is a significant work of particular interest, mainly because it will promote the composer’s piano works internationally since Naxos distributes on a wide scale.

DISSEMINATION OF PUBLISHED WORKS
We have had the opportunity to present talks and conferences about this editorial project in colloquia and national and international congresses that included the exhibition of musical scores. Likewise, all the publications have been donated to libraries of professional music schools, conservatories, and universities in Mexico and abroad. Among the latter, the following ones stand out:

• 2005: Elder Music Library of the University of Adelaide SA, Australia, through the intermediation of Alexander Tsiboulski, professor at that institution.
• 2006: conference gig and master classes on Ponce’s work in Spain and Italy by the author. The publications were delivered to the libraries of the Complutense University of Madrid, the Faculty of Geography and History of Madrid, Music Department; Juan Pedro Carrero Music School of Barcelona (Spain), the Giovanni Battista Martini Conservatory of Bologna and the Giacomo Puccini Institute of Music Studies of Gallarate (Italy).
• 2007: Library of the Conservatory of Bogotá, National University of Colombia, through Master Jaime Cortés, academic at this institution, and their director, Master Mario Sarmiento.
• 2010: Library of Tito Schipa Conservatory, Italy, through its director, Master Pierluigi Camicia. In mid-2010, Luca Chiantore, PhD, musicologist, visited Mexico, giving courses and conferences for pianists. He went to the National School of Music, and shortly after, the material was sent to him in Valencia, Spain.
• 2011: Master Héctor Rojas, critical editor of the project since 2000, presented in the Faculty of Music of Laval University of Quebec, Canada, all the Pnce’s musical scores we had published. These scores were donated to the university library.
• 2013: Thanks to the management carried out by maestro Raúl Zambrano, guest researcher at the FaM and collaborator of our project on the guitar works from his residence in Belgium, and thanks also to diverse embassies of Mexico, the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs, and the libraries of renowned musical institutions from several European countries, the complete collection of Ponce’s musical scores was donated to the Akademia Sibelius (Finland), the Royal Conservatory of Music of Madrid (Spain), the Westminster City Library of Cambridge University (United Kingdom), Royal Irish Academy of Music (Ireland), École Normale de Musique and Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (France), Royal Conservatoire The Hague (Netherlands), Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, Conservatoire Royal de Liège (Belgium), and Conservatoire de Musique de la Ville de Luxembourg (Luxembourg).
• 2018: The complete collection of 27 scores was donated to the library of the Universität für Musik in Vienna, Austria. Master Héctor Rojas delivered and presented the collection.

Finally, with the intention of making our critical editions more and more widely known, the publications continue to be distributed and sent to different places, institutions, and individuals who have requested them. Doing so, not only one of the editorial works carried out by the FaM is presented, but also the work of one of the most representative and transcendent Mexican musicians in the country’s artistic life.

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