Dorottya Fabian, A musicology of performance: Theory and method based on Bach’s Solos for violin

Abstract

Dorottya Fabian, A Musicology of Performance: Theory and Method Based on Bach's Solos for (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015) ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-153-3The somewhat surprising title of Dorottya Fabian's book signifies a new quality in the approach of its subject matter in the most concise manner. Interpretation and performance have been in the forefront of recent publications on music, gradually broadening the scope of pragmatic and non-pragmatic investigations, but Fabian's title is almost a proclamation of a new discipline. To regard the study of performance - traditionally considered a hazardous undertaking from the scholarly point of view - as part of hard-core musicology is a brave proposition indeed.Not that the way has not been prepared by Dorottya Fabian's numerous earlier publications. Her Bach Performance Practice, 1945-1975: A Comprehensive Review of Sound Recordings and Literature (Ashgate, 2003) examined all the commercially available recordings of the Passions, Brandenburg Concertos, and Goldberg Variations; the essay Towards a Performance History of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (in Essays in Honor of Laszlo Somfai, Scarecrow, 2005) is a small-scale prelude to the present book. Parallel with the exhaustive Bach analyses, Fabian became a prominent leader in the of treating performance issues through experimental research. She and her co-workers (at times co-authors) have published extensively on several aspects of musical performance (often in online editions) with remarkable results. Their latest major achievement, a volume produced through joint editorial undertaking, offers a comprehensive account of the means, roles, and manifestations of expressiveness in the performance of Classical music as well as in jazz, popular music, and folk music.1A Musicology of Performance offers an admirably wide spectrum of approximately 40 different recordings of J. S. Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo (BWV 1001-1006) made during the past thirty years or so. (Thus, in a chronological sense, the volume is a continuation of Fabian's former Bach Performance Practice book, now focusing on another genre.) As far as the selected violinists are concerned, they represent historically informed as well as mainstream performance styles, from Ruggiero Ricci and Itzhak Perlman to Julia Fischer and Isabelle Faust, or Jaap Schroder and Sigiswald Kuijken to Rachel Podger. (The pioneer recording of Sergiu Luca, from 1977, is naturally noted as an early herald of the subsequent interpretations on period instrument.)Fabian classifies the violinists as followers of historically informed performance (HIP), or mainstream performance (MSP). She maintains this distinction through the entire course of her discussions, notwithstanding that a clear line of demarcation is less and less feasible as we proceed into the twenty-first century. (And a very healthy phenomenon that is.) As a point of departure, the author defines the constituents of performance (phrasing; articulation and accentuation; bowing; multiple stops; ornamentation; rubato; rhythm; vibrato; dynamics), describes their realization in HIP and MSP manner respectively, then lists the selected violinists' interpretative styles accordingly, in the six solo works of Bach, movement by movement.The methods used for the minute measurement of the above parameters are based on computer technology, through various software programs. Absolutely scientific data are produced, presented in elaborate tables, figures, and graphs. Looking at some of them, the innocent reader would not guess that the book he/ she holds was written about music. The text, too, sounds pretty heavy at times. (See note 4 on p. 132, for instance, illuminating a summary of tempo trends in Table 4.1: R-squared is a statistical measure of how close the data points are to the fitted regression line. It is a measure of variance explained.)Nevertheless, cognitive/computational musicology gains more and more ground nowadays, perhaps to prove that this branch of knowledge can hold its own when compared to the field of natural sciences. …