Historical Performance Practice Research Articles

Mahler Making Love: Mengelberg’s Adagietto

We are accustomed to hearing the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony played as an elegy, appropriate for state funerals and the like. But Wilhelm Mengelberg, once Mahler’s assistant, claimed that the movement was composed as a love letter to Alma, and his performance offers an almost-too-explicit scenario of love making. In this article, I will return to Mengelberg’s argument for this interpretation, then examine the ways his performance decisions produce simulations of erotic interactions. But his reading raises questions concerning historical performance practices: how prevalent were Mengelberg’s tempo fluctuations and portamenti in the early twentieth century? To what extent should these practices inform our readings of other repertories of the time? And why might later conductors have chosen the elegaic mode, despite the fact that they thereby obscure what might be an important trace of Mahler’s erotic sensibilities?

"Encumbered with useless graces": Ornamentation and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-century Scottish Music

Throughout the eighteenth century, a steady stream of Italian musicians travelled to Scotland, in search of artistic and commercial success. Inspired by the enterprise of their Scottish counterparts, many published collections of “Scots Tunes,” such that by the end of the century a rich body of repertoire had emerged. Italians and Scots alike valued this repertoire for various reasons: for some, these tunes represented an idealised vision of pastoral simplicity; for others, a fossilised record of the music of past generations; for others still, these tunes were a vehicle for the expression of nationalistic sentiment. This repertoire presents a challenge to Early Music practitioners today, who must contend with the fact that this music has been transmitted through textual sources and oral tradition. To this end, many musicians engage with elements of Scottish Traditional performance practice – a practice that often diverges from, and is at times incompatible with, dominant understandings of eighteenth-century performance practice. In this thesis, I summarise some of the ornamentation techniques employed by Scottish Traditional musicians, investigating their possible influence on Italian Scots Tunes sources. I contend that comparative analysis of these sources can inform performances of this repertoire, by revealing implicit relationships between notation, performance practice and aesthetic judgements. Further, I survey current trends in the historical performance practice of Scots Tunes, interrogating the ways in which this repertoire is framed by modern conceptions of “folk” music. I observe that this repertoire continues to be valued within a variety of aesthetic frameworks, which are themselves revealed, upheld, and reproduced through performance practice.

Fifty years of debate in Early Music

Early Music, over the course of its 50 years, has become the prime forum for debate on music before 1800. The journal has fostered conversation, agreement and disagreement on a wide range of topics, the most hotly debated of which will be discussed here. Since its inception, Early Music has been a platform for musicologists to publish their research, for performers to discuss historical repertories and historical performance practices, and for both groups to review books, editions, recordings and events in the world of (primarily Anglophone) early music. This broad church of contributors, unique among scholarly journals, has meant that debate has ranged widely and beyond the usual confines of academic research. Also important has been the journal’s frequent issues (four each year) and variety of types of writing, including full-length articles, reviews and letters, which together have enabled debates to retain momentum and welcome the voices of anyone who has an opinion. The field of early music is perhaps especially ripe for debate, given that so much evidence has been lost and that any surviving evidence is frequently ambiguous, partial and contradictory. Key debates of the last 50 years have included the a cappella performance of medieval polyphony; the presence of falsettists in English 16th-century choirs; the performance pitch of Tudor polyphony and certain movements from Monteverdi’s Mass and Vespers of 1610; dotting in French overtures; the performance of conjunct quavers or semiquavers unequally outside of France in the 17th and 18th centuries; and the forces required to perform Bach’s choruses.

"Ancient music – Historical singing" ("Alte Musick – Historischer Gesang") in German Music Universities

The article is devoted to the actual problem of historically grounded performance of Baroque vocal music by academic vocalists. Listening activity, the demand for ancient music in Russia raises issues for performers that need to be resolved within the framework of historical performance practice. To fulfill all the conditions, it becomes important to receive an appropriate specialized education. In Russia, little attention is paid to the professional training of academic vocalists in the field of historical singing or baroque singing, whereas in Italy and Germany independent faculties of ancient music are intensively working, including, along with instrumentalists, the training of singers. The author reveals the features of the content and organization of the educational process in universities in Germany and Russia. The purpose of this article is to identify possible ways to form a solo academic singer of historical specialization. The methodological basis of the work consists of historical, analytical methods that reveal the topic from various angles. Using the example of a number of educational institutions that train specialists in the field of historical singing, such as the University of the Arts Bremen, the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, the Cologne University of Music and the Nuremberg University of Music, the article presents a comparative analysis of curricula, examines the studied disciplines within various modules. The conclusion is made about the prospects of using the experience of foreign countries in the training of specialists in the field of baroque singing.

The Feeling of Sound: Music Curating, Performing and Connecting with and through Music

Long story short In this research exposition, I would like to invite the reader on a journey of discovery in the field of classical music presentation. Over the last 50 years there have been many suggestions on how to allow the professional field of classical music to develop alongside its time and people. To get a new perspective on the topic, I approach ASMR as a connected topic, investigate it under the aspect of listening and then make a transfer to my professional practice. ASMR stands for autonomous sensuous meridian response and is describing a special kind of sensory perception. I study ASMR as way of perception and as well as a YouTube / media phenomenon. My research question is: What can I learn from ASMR (about contemporary audience’s perception of sound) and how can I integrate this in my artistic practice? When I talked to colleagues or teachers from a classical music context, ASMR appeared to them at first as something bizarre and insignificant. Still, it has millions of followers on the internet. A large number of followers is not necessarily an indicator of artistic quality, but it can certainly be an argument to arouse curiosity. After all, the number of followers towards a subject does say something about its appeal or the ability to grasp people. By comparing ASMR to synaesthesia, I want to focus on perception and sensuousness but also explore common traits and differences of the two phenomena as both neurological phenomenon and the social (artistic) movement. An analysis and five experiments involving technological and dramaturgical tools often used in ASMR, leads to the final chapter: the artistic implementation. During the two years of my master studies, I designed two performance concepts, in which I applied the insights I gained throughout this research. A documentation of the process and a more elaborate explanation of the concept are to be found in chapter 4. In the end of this exposition, I summarize the conclusions of the research I made on a general and on a personal level. In order to acquire more information as well as a wider view, I have reached out to literature within the fields of sociology, (social) history, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy . During my years of studies in music, music pedagogic, historical and innovative performance practice, I quenched my thirst for knowledge about the past and now I am hungry to learn about the now and the future.

Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space and Sound in American Cultural History, by Christopher J. Smith

<i>Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space and Sound in American Cultural History</i>, by Christopher J. Smith

Volume 51 (2021)

Volume 51 (2021)

A Study on Ornamentation and Expression in French vocal Music (1650-1750)

This study aims to understand and learn about the historical performance practice in the 17th century. As an early music singer, I am attracted to the sweet and charming 17th-century French vocal music. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between French ornamentation and expression. This research investigates the background of 17th-century performance practice in France in relation to the ornamentation, the pronunciation of 17th-century French, the different types of ornaments and the expression implied by the ornaments. The performance practice in the 17th century was different from now since it was undergoing a major change from polyphonic to solo music, which emphasised more the text than the music. The knowledge of ornamentation was an expected requirement for all well-trained singers in the 17th century, ornamentation was not merely a decoration, but a tool in emphasizing the importance of the text. Thus, it is necessary to learn ornamentation for a complete 17th-century French vocal performance. Since text was the main element in 17th-century French vocal music, it is important to know the characteristics of French language in this period. The ability to distinguish French long and short syllables was important because ornamentation could only be applied mostly to long syllables. The pronunciation of certain French vowels has undergone a significant alteration, and the ‘old’ way of pronouncing them is included in the study. The research findings also show that some ornaments were meant to be used only in certain expression and they help me to better ‘compose’ French ornamentation in future performances.

Interpersonal Soliloquy: Self and Audience in Shakespeare and Augustine

This essay re-examines the meaning of Shakespearean soliloquies in light of both historical context and performance practice, arguing that they stage the interpersonal dimensions of identity in early modern culture. Solo speeches in Richard II and Hamlet offer textual evidence of their intended performance not as mere inward contemplation but as direct encounters with the playhouse audience. As dialogic speech acts, they constitute a deliberate ontological paradox: the act of speaking “alone” onstage becomes a dynamic interpersonal process in which the audience plays a crucial role. This key stage-audience exchange resonates with the practice of Augustinian “soliloquy” as exemplified in contemporary religious texts. Augustine’s own Soliloquies are alive with the paradox that his fullest act of self-speaking is inherently a dialogue, voicing not just subjective experience but the reciprocal recognition of an interlocutor. By the late seventeenth century, however, the neoclassical disparagement of direct-address soliloquy as unnatural and ridiculous reflects a radical shift toward conceptions of the self as a more discrete and self-contained entity. Critical readings of Shakespearean soliloquy have often followed that post-Renaissance view, missing the significant role of the audience that Shakespeare writes into the action of soliloquy. Today’s players have helped to recover that dramaturgy of interplay. [N.S.]

Historical materiality of performance: On the costumes of The Rite of Spring (1913)

By focusing on surviving costumes of the 1913 production of The Rite of Spring, this article asks how a close examination of costumes and their role in historical performance practice can change our understanding of a canonical work of art. It argues for methodological pluralism in examining material remains together with manuscript annotations, images and reviews of the production rarely considered in previous research and, consequentially, for a critical examination of all previous claims, including the so-called reconstruction (1987) of The Rite of Spring. Compared with designs and costumes of other productions by the Ballets Russes company, those of the 1913 production explain much of the contradictory ways in which the work figured in discourses relating to art and modernism in France and Russia at the time. Most importantly, the costumes exemplify a particular tradition of making theatre that has been obscured by the prevailing Orientalist view of the Ballets Russes company that is hegemonic in what is claimed to be ‘known’ about The Rite of Spring and its reception.

Reconstructing Zarzuela Performance Practices ca. 1900

This article makes an initial contribution to the largely unexplored field of historical performance practice in zarzuela by examining the earliest surviving recordings of Manuel Fernández Caballero’s Gigantes y cabezudos (1898). One of the greatest successes of the género chico subgenre of zarzuela during the early years of commercial phonography in Spain, it is also the zarzuela of which the most recordings made before 1905 have survived: nineteen, made on wax cylinders by local gabinetes fonográficos and on disc by Gramophone. Both the thriving género chico culture and its singing practices, as well as the technological, commercial, and cultural aspects of the early recording industry in Spain, are discussed to consider how recordings related to live performance in this particular context, what the value is of these recordings as documents of performance practice, and what questions they open up for further study of performance practice in zarzuela.

Reimagining Historical Improvisation

Reimagining historical improvisation is a speculative pursuit: like any other aspect of historical performance practice, historical improvisations by living musicians create modern sounds (Taruskin 1995). However, historical notations, treatises, and accounts of performances provide substantial clues for reconstructing historical practices of improvisation (Gjerdingen 2007a; Levin 2009; Sanguinetti 2012; Guido 2017). Gjerdingen (2007a) highlights the role of phrase schemata in eighteenth-century music learning and creativity in composition, improvisation, or anywhere in between. Levin’s live improvisation in the style of Mozart at Cambridge University on October 29, 2012, captured on YouTube, serves as an analytical case study for the significance of conventional schemata in the musicianship of a living, elite-expert historical improviser. I reflect on Levin’s manipulations of schemata, allusions to the original pieces requested by the audience, as well as on interconnections between the various parts of his fantasy. Music analysis thus becomes here a reflection on improvisatory technique. The analysis also outlines the challenging listening horizons for audience members with significant experience in the style. Finally, our age of digital reproduction allows us to turn this ephemeral act of musical communication into an object for speculation, creating analytical “suggestions” for readers (Temperley 1999) or a listening guide for a historically-informed fantasy.

Musical performance informed by history and vice versa: how philosophy could help music and history learn from each other

ABSTRACT ‘Historically informed performance’ (HIP) has become standard practice for the performance of ‘early music’ composed before 1800 and is increasingly applied to more recent compositions. The approach provokes controversy for the tension between its claims to replicate historical performance practice, the observation that the resulting ‘period’ style often reflects present-day stylistic preferences and the inference that its attribution to the past is more imagined than real. Musicians who practice HIP identify dilemmas which relate to questions of historical evidence and interpretation. The philosophy of music currently neglects the dilemmas that performers identify as problematic for HIP. In contrast, the philosophy of history makes scant reference to musical performance but extensively examines the understanding and interpretation of historical texts. Musicians share with historians the need to engage with the past. Musicians should find it instructive to consult the philosophy of history on how historians construct an account of the past. Historians may find informative the way in which the nature of music and the HIP of older music highlight performative aspects of the historical account, allow comparison between parallel debates in historiography and musicology and suggest how changes over time in audience reception affect the comprehensibility of the historical account.

Heuristic and supervised approaches to handwritten annotation extraction for musical score images

Performers’ copies of musical scores are typically rich in handwritten annotations, which capture historical and institutional performance practices. The development of interactive interfaces to explore digital archives of these scores and the systematic investigation of their meaning and function will be facilitated by the automatic extraction of handwritten score annotations. We present several approaches to the extraction of handwritten annotations of arbitrary content from digitized images of musical scores. First, we show promising results in certain contexts when using simple unsupervised clustering techniques to identify handwritten annotations in conductors’ scores. Next, we compare annotated scores to unannotated copies and use a printed sheet music comparison tool, Aruspix, to recover handwritten annotations as additions to the clean copy. Using both of these techniques in a combined annotation pipeline qualitatively improves the recovery of handwritten annotations. Recent work has shown the effectiveness of reframing classical optical musical recognition tasks as supervised machine learning classification tasks. In the same spirit, we pose the problem of handwritten annotation extraction as a supervised pixel classification task, where the feature space for the learning task is derived from the intensities of neighboring pixels. After an initial investment of time required to develop dependable training data, this approach can reliably extract annotations for entire volumes of score images without further supervision. These techniques are demonstrated using a sample of orchestral scores annotated by professional conductors of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Handwritten annotation extraction in musical scores has applications to the systematic investigation of score annotation practices by performers, annotator attribution, and to the interactive presentation of annotated scores, which we briefly discuss.

“We Can Always Empathize with Ourselves”: Pastiche, Parody, and Rock Journalism in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013)

This article studies the hipster as the neoliberal offspring of the yuppie. In order to understand the pillars of these cultures, the focus is on their staging of a musicology. I use the term “musicology” here as an umbrella term for the musicological musings of representatives of each of the subcultures studied here. These often encompass approaches to the scholarly analysis of music as regards historical musicology, performance practice, or music theory.of this paper also studies the music industry’s corresponding modes of production by the lived experience of both the hipster and the yuppie subcultures. For a closer reading of these, the parodied rhetoric of music journalism in the novel American Psycho and its film adaptation will serve as a starting point to discuss the relevance of economic and cultural capital in subcultural style or fashion statements.

Holding the violin and how it influences sound and playing in historical performance practice. Historical perspectives.

Name: Agnieszka Papierska Main subject: Baroque violin Title of research: Holding the violin and how it influences sound and playing in historical performance practice. Historical perspectives. Research coach: Margaret Urquhart Research questions: How much would the sound of the violin change with holding it in different position? Could this be a tool of expression? Does the way we hold the instrument influence other choices we make about performance practice e.g. regarding fingering, bowing? Could this knowledge be used in performance practice today? Summary of results: During the baroque and classical period many different ways of holding the violin existed, often at the same time. This paper investigates the way in which the different positions of holding the instrument could change the sound of it. After studying at sources and making experiments with different posture it can be confirmed that that the sound changes with different ways of holding the violin. The technique and interpretation are also affected. The main conclusion is that violin technique is not unchangeable. We can adjust it in order to develop sound that we desire. Biography: Agnieszka is an accomplished and experienced chamber music and orchestral musician. She started her professional career at a very early age. While still a student in Poland she collaborated with many professional orchestras where she worked with world-class conductors and soloists. After completing her Bachelor's diploma in modern violin an interest in historical performance practice let to her move to the Netherlands in order to study in the early music department of The Hague Royal Conservatory. In 2012 she also completed the master studies in Wroclaw Academy of Music in Poland. Currently she works with Theresia Youth Baroque Orchestra in Italy and also performs with other groups in the Netherlands and abroad. She plays an anonymous 18th century violin from the Klingenthal region.

Musical Bodies: Corporeality, Emergent Subjectivity, and Improvisational Spaces

Interactive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces) involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between performers and active listeners, between the sonic "bodies" that comprise the multiple overlapping events that constitute a musical performance’s unfolding. Music scholarship tends to focus on either music’s sonic materialities (the sensible; what can be heard) or the cultural resonances that locate in and through music (the political or hermeneutic; how meaning is inscribed in and for a listening subject). An embodied turn, however, has recently been manifesting, bringing music scholarship into communication with feminist theory, queer theory, and approaches that foreground subjectivity and embodiment. Exemplary in this area are works by Naomi Cumming (who asks a critical question, “does the self form the sound, or the sound the self?;” Cumming 7), Suzanne Cusick, Marion Guck, Fred Maus, and Susan McClary. All of these scholars, in various ways, thematise the performative—what it feels like to make or experience music, and what effect that making or experiencing has on subject-formation. All of these authors strive to foreground the role of the performer and performativity in the context of the extended Western art music tradition. While each makes persuasive, significant points, my contention in this paper is that improvised music is a more fruitful starting place for thinking about embodiment and the co-constitutive relationship between performer and sound. That is, while (nearly) all music is improvised to a greater or lesser degree, the more radical contexts, in which paths are being selected and large-scale shapes drawn in the “heat of the moment,” can bring these issues into stark relief and serve as more productive entry points for thinking through crucial questions of embodiment, perspective, identity, and emergent meaning.

Should (early) Baroque music be equally tempered? Vincenzo Galilei’s 1584Libro d’intavolatura di liutoand its wider implications for historical performance practice

Vincenzo Galilei (late 1520s–1591), father of the famous astronomer Galileo and a prolific member of Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Florentine Camerata, was a seminal figure not only in the development of the late Renaissance lute style, but also in that of early Baroque music. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that his ground-breaking collection of solo lute music, entitled Libro d’intavolatura di liuto (1584), demonstrated the practical benefits of a ‘well-tempered’ tuning system 138 years before J. S. Bach’s Well-tempered clavier . Žak Ozmo argues that the organization of the collection is indicative of Galilei’s (and his contemporaries’) advocacy for equal temperament.

The advent of the transverse flute in Italy and its use in mixed consorts during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

ABSTRACT Title of Research: The advent of the transverse flute in Italy and its use in mixed consorts during the sixteenth and ear-ly seventeenth centuries Research Question: Which were the possible combinations of instruments that included flute and which occasions saw performances of these mixed consorts? Summary of results: The performance of vocal polyphony on instruments during the sixteenth century appears to be guided by two main ideas. On the one hand, musicians tried to imitate the a cappella choir with homogeneous instrumental consorts, or whole consorts, where the instruments belonged to the same family. On the other hand, they tried to maintain the polyphonic texture clear, letting instruments with a very different timbre play in a mixed choir, or mixed consort. Based on a wide array of sources (letters, chronicles, iconography, inventories, instruction treatises, and surviving instruments) my Research Paper investigates the possibilities of combining the flute with other instruments and with voices in mixed consort settings. My main conclusion is that whole and mixed consorts did not follow a completely separate development, but the two choirs would often overlap and integrate in many different combinations, with much freedom and invention. This consideration should encourage modern performers of secular Italian music of the sixteenth century to keep their mind open to the possibility of transforming a cappella compositions into colorful ensembles mixing voices and different instruments. Biography: Giuditta Isoldi studied at the Conservatory of Florence, where she graduated in Flute with Paolo Zampini. In 2010 she moved to the Netherlands where she focused her studies on Historical in-formed Performance Practice of the flute and she obtained a Bachelor in Traverso with Barthold Kuijken at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Next to Traverso, she studies baroque Oboe with Frank de Bruine. She is currently attending a Master in Traverso at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague with Barthold Kuijken, Kate Clark and Wilbert Hazelzet.

Reviews: Arnold Schönberg Center, Britten Thematic Catalog, and John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive

Other| December 01 2014 Reviews: Arnold Schönberg Center, Britten Thematic Catalog, and John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive Arnold Schönberg Center. Christian Meyer, Director. URL: http://www.schoenberg.at/Britten Thematic Catalog. Lucy Walker, Director of Learning and Development. URL: http://www.brittenpears.org/John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive. John Haim, Curator. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. URL: http://exhibitions.nypl.org/johncage/ Joseph Auner Joseph Auner Joseph Auner is Professor of Music at Tufts University. Recent publications include: Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries and Anthology of Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries, vol. 6 of Western Music in Context: A Norton History; and “Wanted Dead and Alive: Historical Performance Practice and Electro-Acoustic Music from Abbey Road to IRCAM,” in Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles, ed. Craig Monson and Roberta Marvin. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2014) 67 (3): 866–880. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2014.67.3.866 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Joseph Auner; Reviews: Arnold Schönberg Center, Britten Thematic Catalog, and John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2014; 67 (3): 866–880. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2014.67.3.866 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search My goal here is to survey the ways in which archival materials are being made available online for three composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, and John Cage. These three may seem an unlikely trio; indeed their works, ideas, and their relationships to the past and to their audiences represent very different trajectories in twentieth-century music. But one thing they all shared was a profound and lifelong interest in preserving their sketches and manuscripts, correspondence, writings, libraries, and much of the minutiae of their creative and personal lives. Their own collections—subsequently sustained and developed through the efforts of their families, partners, and colleagues—became the basis for the archives now housed at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, and the major Cage holdings in several libraries, including the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. While no doubt the three composers had different reasons for preserving... You do not currently have access to this content.