Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music. Ed. by Scott McCarrey and Lesley A. Wright

Abstract

Scott McCarrey and Lesley A. Wright’s new collection of edited essays, Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music, is a significant achievement that provides a number of penetrating insights into the performance practice of the French piano tradition. Although the field of Performance Studies has developed considerably in recent decades, French piano repertory—with the notable exceptions of Charles Timbrell’s French Pianism: A Historical Perspective (London, 1999) and Roy Howat’s The Art of French Piano Music: Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, and Chabrier (New Haven and London, 2009)—has not yet received much scholarly attention. The present collection makes an important contribution to remedying this. Through examining analysis-informed performance (in its broadest sense), McCarrey and Wright’s new collection provides a timely reminder that scores rarely give us all the information that we need to create music, and that, as musicians, we always need to seek creative solutions to musical (and notational) questions. By drawing upon a wide range of resources and techniques, including critical editions, early recordings, oral traditions passed down from teachers to students, reception history, sketch studies, and analysis, the collection reminds us of the many sources that we have at our disposal to examine alongside the score in order to reach deeper understandings of musical works and to create enriched performances. The analysis of early recordings is of particular importance throughout the volume and underpins the findings of four of the eight chapters. This alone reminds us that the practice of evaluating such materials critically, as a standard methodological resource, has moved into the mainstream of musicological investigation—thanks in a large part to the innovative and pioneering work of Robert Philip (Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance (Cambridge, 1992); Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven, 2004)), and consolidated by the extensive research efforts of the CHARM Project (www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/index.html).