Editorial policy
How Field Music Notes is written and checked, what it will not publish, and how corrections and rights are handled.
Page of the desk · Edition of
Field Music Notes publishes one kind of page: a piece that answers a single question about the music of the American Civil War era. Everything on the site is written by its editors and checked against sources a reader can obtain. Nothing on the site is sold, sponsored or placed.
Sources
A piece names the sources it read, in the reading notes at the foot of the page. In this field the useful sources are printed songbooks and sheet music with their publishers and dates, instruction books for fife, drum and bugle, band ledgers and regimental records where they survive, catalogues and finding aids from libraries, archives and museums, published histories and discographies, and recordings that can be heard or consulted. A source that is not named was not used.
What is published and what is not
Published: the history of a song, a tune, an instrument or an ensemble where it can be documented; the practice of playing, tuning, repairing and recording period music; the way a season, a programme or a collection is put together; and the state of the printed evidence.
Not published: invented quotes, invented payments, invented personnel, invented dates, restored pages of this domain that never existed, unsourced claims about who owns what today, and any page whose purpose is to sell something or to point a reader at a seller.
Corrections and rights
A correction is published as a change to the piece and a new checked-on date, never as a silent edit. Where a piece quotes or reproduces a document, the desk names the holding institution and describes the document rather than presenting a modern retyping as the original. Photographs on the site are made for the piece and captioned as scenes, not as historical records.