In speaking of the performer's pilgrimage to the sources, by source I mean a source in the classical sense. A source is a spring, a fountain; a source is not necessarily something fixed. What one finds at a source is not a mineral deposit; it is something that does not stay put; it flows; it is in constant motion and change. Now the term used for sources of texts is usually applied in a much more static way. Such works, for example, as Eitner's pioneering Quellen-Lexicon are simply listings of earliest known versions of musical texts, whether in manuscript or in print. But in German, quelle is also a spring, a bubbling up of water, something that is in constant self-renewal; source in French has the same significance, and I suspect that the original Latin derivations for the Italian fonte are loaded with the same connotations. In other words, we are not necessarily talking about founts as one speaks of founts of type, although I suppose that there again one might think that the combinations and ideas that emerge from founts of type could conceivably be as shifting and as inexhaustible as those combinations and unpredictabilities that emerge from any source. Be that as it may, a great deal of what we are discussing here concerns itself with sources of musical texts as far as they are necessary and useful to the performer.

In the search for a text as the composer left it or for a text as the composer may be believed to have intended it, there is implied a further search, and that is the search into the composer and behind him, into his motivation, his formation, his ambience, into the context in which he wrote his music, and ultimately into his own sources of inspiration. For this we often have to cross numerous and formidable barriers of time, language, and culture. There are also all sorts of sources of information and inspiration around us and within us on which we have the privilege of calling. I think it is quite impossible to prescribe or precisely to delimit what may conceivably serve as information or enlightenment to the performer. The grace that eludes the scholar may well descend on the conservatory student and vice versa. Anything that may be of conceivable use is worth pursuing.