George Gershwin wrote An American in Paris after visiting the city in the 1920's. One of the distinctive sounds of that piece includes French taxi horns, and new scholarship is questioning the pitches of those horns. According to Mark Clague, associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, the way the parts are notated in the original score is open to interpretation. The parts in question refer to the horns as "A", "B", "C", and "D" which everyone until now took as an indication of pitch. In a new critical edition of the piece, Clague argues that the parts are indicating which horn to play, not the note itself.
To read more, see the New York Times article here.
For information on the Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan, click here.