Performance Practice Issues Research Articles

A Conversation with Milton Babbitt and Robert Taub about Performing the West Coast Premiere of Preludes, Interludes, and Postlude

At a May 1992 music festival at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this semi-private discussion reflects on numerous performers of Babbitt's music and issues of performance practice, including notation, the performance of rhythm, and texture.

Interpretation and Performance Practice in Realizing Stockhausen's Studie II

ABSTRACTIn the 1950s, using electronic devices to make music seemed a new paradigm for composers eager to remove the effects of interpretation on their relationship with their audience. The promise was that compositional ideas could be directly made into sound with the help of a technician whose task it was to carry out instructions. By making a new realization of Stockhausen's Studie II, composed in 1954, I interrogate many of the original techniques and practices, and show that there are many sites which require interpretation and raise issues of performance practice. The implication of these discoveries is that there may be advantages to an analysis of early electronic music of the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the practice of instrumental music, and that where there are references to ‘technicians’, great care should be taken to understand and appreciate the range of musical skills often required by such individuals. This approach to realization also raises serious questions about the ontology of electronic music.

Fanfares and Finesse: A Performer’s Guide to Trumpet History and Literature by Elisa Koehler (review)

Fanfares and Finesse: A Performer's Guide Trumpet History and Literature. By Elisa Koehler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. [xviii, 240 p. ISBN 9780253011794 (hardcover), $48; ISBN 9780253011794 (e-book), $39.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. Fully grasping the rich and diverse history of the trumpet can be a bit overwhelming since it an instrument that (more so than most stringed instruments) continually evolved for centuries before finally settling on what we now know as the modern trumpet. Elisa Koehler, an active trumpeter and professor of music at Goucher College, has masterfully succeeded in creating a book whose purpose is consolidate information about the trumpet family--some of it for the first time--into an accessible format and render it easy find (p. xiv). Furthermore, rather than presenting this as a simple history of the instrument, Koehler instead brings historical scholarship and performance pedagogy together to introduce techniques and issues related playing period (p. 1), which makes this volume useful the active trumpeter, not just the scholar. The volume divided into two main categories following a general introductory chapter. Chapters 2 through 11 deal with various predecessors and variations on the trumpet along with some performance issues such as pitch and transposition. This first section has a plethora of pictures that are helpful better understand many of the physical differences between these related instruments as well as proper playing positions. The latter portion of the book, chapters 12 through 21, focuses on the repertoire and performance practice issues. While each category of the book proceeds in a roughly chronological manner, I agree with Koehler's advice that the reader should feel free skip around and read the chapters out of order (p. xv) after reading the first introductory chapter. Following that, each chapter generally self-referential and on a fairly specific topic thereby standing alone. Whether one decides read from cover cover or only certain chapters, the author's passion and expertise consistently apparent throughout the entire work. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 address the natural trumpet, modern baroque trumpet with vent holes, cornetto, and slide trumpet. Each chapter, with the exception of the fifth, treats its subject similarly. First, a factual and historical overview of each instrument prodded. Next, these chapters present practical information about how a modern trumpet player can begin approach playing these historical instruments and what benefits modern playing a trumpeter might experience as a result. Despite this general formula, each chapter does not slavishly provide the same information for each new topic. For example, tips about starting play the natural trumpet are covered, but the cornetto chapter focuses more on selecting an instrument and finger technique. The fifth chapter differs from the others in that it does not provide performance tips: instead it focuses on explaining technical aspects of the Renaissance, baroque, and English slide trumpets. The next five chapters focus on instruments that generally include valves. Chapter 6 focuses on the evolution from natural instruments through hand-stopping and then finally the valve. Various types of bugles and flugelhorns are quickly discussed in the next chapter before a more detailed examination of the cornet in chapter 8. The real treasure of this section occurs in chapter 9, Changing of the Guard: Trumpets in Transition. In addition providing basic factual information about the development and introduction of the modern trumpet, Koehler also highlights several historic moments, such as virtuoso solo competitions pitting the trumpet against the cornet or keyed bugle, which spurred the adoption of the trumpet as the de facto choice for this instrumental voice. …

Performing Brahms in the 21st century

Half a century ago the issues of performance practice associated with the music of Johannes Brahms might have seemed both clear-cut and safe from academic scrutiny. In the 1960s even the most ardent advocate of historical performance was unlikely to have made a project of playing Brahms’s works in period style. As this recent symposium on performance practice demonstrated, much has changed. An international assembly of scholars, students and professional musicians met at the School of Music in the University of Leeds between 30 June and 2 July 2015 to present and evaluate some of the latest findings in performance practice research. The 24 presentations of this symposium did much to illuminate the performance styles of musicians within Brahms’s circle. The many musical demonstrations, along with snippets of historical recordings, forced the conclusion that popular assumptions about what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performances of Brahms’s music are ripe for re-evaluation.

Tercentenary Emanuel Bach

Studies of C. P. E. Bach have entered a new phase recently, partly fuelled by the discovery of new sources transforming the state of his work-list. David Schulenberg’s magisterial study of the complete oeuvre, published in the composer’s tercentenary year, is thus in more ways than one a timely contribution to the literature on this important figure. In an earlier phase, Hans-Günter Ottenberg’s Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (original German edition 1982; translated by Philip J. Whitmore, 1987) helped to set in motion the process of making this previously somewhat elusive composer and his work more accessible. In the intervening years a host of scholarly studies and editions have helped raise the composer’s profile, together with a noticeable increase in concert performances and recordings. Schulenberg’s book represents the fruits of long acquaintance with the composer and his work, expanding the territory covered by his earlier study of C. P. E. Bach’s instrumental music (Ann Arbor, 1984) to take in the vocal music alongside; it also proves to be in fact (if not in name) a life-and-works study, despite the author’s prefatory disclaimer (p.x). The arrangement of chapters is an outward sign of this, with the chapter titles predominantly conveying the composer’s life stages. (I wondered if attaching date-spans to these titles or providing a separate timeline of the life might have been additionally helpful.) With regard to the music, the author’s record of published scholarship on Johann Sebastian Bach and on Emanuel Bach’s older brother Wilhelm Friedemann puts him in what is possibly a uniquely strong position from which to consider Emanuel’s achievements in the context of the Bach family, while his keyboard expertise (in chamber as well as solo performance) illuminates his commentary on specific works, and on performance practice issues generally.

The Use of YouTube to Improve Students’ Acuity and Analytic Skills in Discussion of Issues in Music Performance

The emergence of YouTube as a public and easily accessible resource for musical performances provides both opportunities and challenges for tertiary level music teaching. The simultaneous combination of visual and aural recognition greatly aids the understanding of music performance practice issues: listening and scrutiny of video footage of both historical and recent performances is an important research activity for developing understanding of past and current performance practices. Such learning enables the skill development and stylistic awareness to underpin more authentic or aesthetically pleasing individual musical interpretation and performance. The authors conducted a study in 2012 to evaluate the use of YouTube footage in classroom settings to initiate discussion of performance practices and raise students’ awareness of the effect of the individual persona on a given interpretation. The study found that students developed a more nuanced understanding of what was needed, visually and aurally, to create stylish and professionally credible performances as well as gaining greater awareness and understanding of criteria that can be used to assess the performance of others. A follow up study in 2014 evaluated tertiary music performance students’ subsequent use of YouTube outside the classroom environment. The data strongly suggests that the earlier use of YouTube as a teaching tool in the curriculum and the development of critical awareness and judgment in that forum has contributed to this cohort’s willingness to engage with this audio-visual resource for personal learning and that they exhibit a high degree of critical judgment in their viewing and use of the resource

Johann Pachelbels geistliche Vokalmusik / Duhovna glasba Johanna Pachelbla

Johann Pachelbel’s sacred vocal music, especially his works composed for the specific needs of the Nuremberg liturgy, can be considered the apex of his compositional achievements. This paper discusses some background liturgical performance practice issues and analyzes the pieces from the point of view of their structure and style. The appendix contains a catalogue of Pachelbel’s sacred works.

Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom by John Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness (review)

REVIEWS 889 Naroditskaya deftly shifts the focus of attention to a new and unexpected field. Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage provokes as much as it illuminates; its confident and successful fusion of methodologies borrowed from literary criticism, musical analysis, historical reconstruction and gender studies means that it repays repeated rereading from a number of different perspectives and should be of considerable interest to scholars working in all of the above fields. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Van den Toorn, Pieter and McGinness, John. Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom. Music since 1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012. xi + 324 pp. Tables. Figures. Music examples. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. £60.00: $99.00. This is a useful book. It complements Pieter van den Toorn’s The Rite of Spring (Berkeley, CA, 1987) with two long chapters each on Les Noces and Renard, and one on Symphonies of Wind Instruments. There is a wealth of forensic detail about familiar van den Toornian topics like the octatonic scale or referential collection, in particular the interaction between octatonic and diatonic collections; rhythm and meter, in particular metric displacement; the construction of ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ readings of listening (p. 20 n. 29); and the relationship between borrowed folk melodies and Stravinskii’s own ‘powers of fabrication’ (p. 120). The book is vintage van den Toorn: slow to read but rewarding if one perseveres and acclimatizes oneself to the style. One finishes it having survived ‘octatonic fever’ (p. 167), though there is an introduction to the topic in chapter two. There are perceptive insights into the structure of the infamous bassoon solo in The Rite of Spring (pp. 132–33); the interval patterning in Les Noces, which was loosely modelled on the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral as transcribed in a sketch (p. 69 n. 51, ex. 3.5); and the use of neo-Riemannian theory to produce Tonnetz graphs of pitch space in Les Noces and Renard (pp. 141–47, 216–20) — a brilliant idea deserving more work. As with van den Toorn’s earlier writings, the underlying ideology is that aesthetic ‘Immediacy and the world of reflection and analysis are complementary, of course, symbiotic as an ideal’ (p. 302). The ‘complexity of the invention’ (p. 172) remains a marker of value, and more complex musical textures attract more hyperbolic analytical writing. It is also unsurprising that, despite eclectic references to music psychology, listening is still configured as ‘reading’ (e.g. p. 278), and that van den Toorn and McGinness make extensive assumptions about what the listener sees in the score while listening. This is less a Freudian slip than an acknowledged axiom — theirs is a particular type SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 890 of listener. This said, while citing Dahlhaus is hardly empirical proof of the listening process (p. 133), the references to music psychology are welcome, for they open suggestive avenues for further inquiry (Stravinskii is rarely used in empirical studies, no doubt for the reasons discussed in chapter ten). One subject broached by van den Toorn and McGinness is that of upbeats. This runs throughout the book but is only properly thematized when mentioningKeller’scritiqueofStravinskii(pp.249,299–301).Inseveralrespects Stravinskii’s (re-)introduction of real upbeats into his music during the 1920s (the Serenade in A was the turning point) was his other ‘rejoicing discovery’ (p. 173), and a major factor in the development of his mature Neoclassicism. In the earlier music considered by van den Toorn and McGinness, the upbeat had a more radical function: ‘In a giant form of displacement, upbeat figures identified with development and forward movement were shifted to the downbeat’ (p. 249). The final two chapters are on ‘Issues of Performance Practice and Aesthetic Belief’ and ‘Stravinsky and His Critics’. The argument in chapter nine is in essence a simple reversal of the convention that Stravinskii’s formalist aesthetics and strictures about performance directed his musical language. Rather, say van den Toorn and McGinness, ‘Stravinsky’s formalism and performance directives have been viewed here as a logical outgrowth of those processes, above all of processes of displacement, juxtaposition, and...

Style and Performance for Bowed String Instruments in French Baroque Music by Mary Cyr (review)

Style and Performance for String Instruments in Baroque Music. By Mary Cyr. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. [xxi, 256 p. ISBN 9781409405696. $104.95.] examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.At the very beginning of the eighteenth century, an avid listener in Paris, his words filtered through the English translation of a German musician in London, observed, As to the Instruments; our Masters touch the Violin much finer, and with a greater Nicety than they do in Italy. Ev'ry Stroke of their Bow sounds harsh, if broken, and disagreeable, if continued (Francois Raguenet, A Comparison between the and Italian Musick and Opera's, trans. Johann Ernst Galliard [London, 1709)], 9-10). Originally published anonymously as Paralele des Italiens et des Francois en ce qui regarde la musique et les opera (Paris, 1702), ostensibly as an objective comparison of the two competing styles, Raguenet's treatise, which actually tended to favor the Italians, ignited a fierce, ongoing public debate over the relative merits of the two styles and the feasibility of merging them into the blended gouts reunis, eventually culminating half a century later in the Querelle des Bouffons, when musical taste finally succumbed to the Italian style. It is therefore telling that this author who extolled the virtues of the Italians, especially with regard to opera and singing, contrasted the two styles in his original text even more strongly than his London translator, pejoratively applying the verb vieller, derived from vielle, used for playing the hurdy-gurdy or rustic fiddling, to describe the sustained playing of the Italians: Tous les coups d'archet des Italiens sont tresdurs lors qu'ils sont detachez les uns des autres; & lors qu'ils les veulent lier, ils viellent d'une maniere tres-desagreable (p. 17). Faced with such polemics and an approach that is frequently defined by what it is not, it is no wonder that modern performers are baffled when trying to understand baroque style.In Style and Performance for String Instruments in Baroque Music, Mary Cyr presents a work that goes a long way toward demystifying baroque performance practice for string players. In so doing, she discusses not only the practices specific to string playing, such as issues of bowing and fingering, but more broadly the practices of music making in France that affect string playing, including ornamentation, rhythmic inequality, pitch, and temperament. To this end, Cyr organizes the book in four main parts. Sources and Style in Baroque Music (pp. 3-27) is divided into two chapters, the first of which (pp. 3-13) introduces the rudiments of what must be generally considered in addressing issues of performance practice and the application of this knowledge to current performance, while the second chapter, French and Italian Style: The Great Divide (pp. 15-27), outlines the significant differences between the two leading national schools of the time, presenting some of the important contemporaneous sources that were so concerned with what made style special. Part 2, Bowed String Instruments in Ensembles (pp. 29-61), has chapters that deal with specific sizes and families of instruments used (pp. 31-43) and, more specifically, with the different bowed bass instruments in the viol and violin families in their capacities as both solo and accompanying instruments (pp. 45-61). While Cyr devotes space to describing the basse de violon in this section (pp. 45-47), she could be clearer about the different functions distinguishing this instrument from the violoncelle, a distinction that Michel Corrette still emphasized in his cello treatise, published, by his estimation, some twenty-five to thirty years after the violoncelle had supplanted the ancient basse de violon. (Michel Corrette, Methode, theorique et pratique pour apprendre en peu de tems le violoncelle dans sa perfection [Paris, 1741]). …

A Mozart bonanza

One of the most recent contributions to Mozart literature is John Irving's book Understanding Mozart's piano sonatas (Aldershot, 2010), in which the keyboard sonatas are approached from various angles, including analysis, the study of autographs, the comparison of editions and the evaluation of sound recordings. The book centres on the closer proximity that existed in Mozart's time between composition and performance; Irving advocates recapturing this connection in modern approaches to the works. In fact, the study can be read as a direct challenge to a performing tradition that grew up around Mozart's solo keyboard works in the 19th century and survives to the present, in which the spheres of composition and performance are firmly separated. This tradition was founded on the ‘work concept’ as formulated by Lydia Goehr, whereby in about 1800 musical works began to achieve iconic status, enshrined in a text (Understanding Mozart's piano sonatas, p.7). Performance entailed fidelity to those texts, as embodied in ‘authentic’ editions; it imposed restraint in the handling of dynamics, pedalling and ornamentation, and propagated the all-encompassing legato that one's piano teachers always insisted on, fortified by the ‘editorial tendency’ to ‘smother’ Mozart's sonatas ‘beneath legato slurs’ (Understanding Mozart's piano sonatas, p. 68). According to Irving, perceiving Mozart's keyboard works in such a way that is unfettered by the strictures of the ‘work concept’ means above all reviving the art of embellishment. It also seems to mean performing Mozart's keyboard works on restored instruments or replicas connected with the late 18th century, thus reviving the issues of performance practice that informed Mozart's own approaches as both player and composer. Irving discusses two recordings amongst the group of twelve discs being reviewed here, Robert Levin's Mozart: Piano Sonatas K279, K280 & K281, vol.1 (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 82876 84237 2, rec 2005, 55′) and Tom Beghin's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sonatas K331 (Alla Turca), K570, Fantasia K397, Adagio K540 (Et’cetera KTC 4015, rec 2005, 72′).

Heinrich Scheidemann's Keyboard Music: Transmission, Style, and Chronology (review)

Heinrich Scheidemann's Keyboard Music: Transmission, Style, and Chronology. By Pieter Dirksen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xxiii, 254 p. ISBN-10 0754654419; ISBN-13 9780754654414. $99.95.] Illustra - tions, maps, music examples, bibliographic references, index. Heinrich Scheidemann (ca. 1595-1663) has emerged in recent decades as perhaps the most important and original north German organist-composer of the early baroque. The author of the present volume has previously published a major study of Sweelinck, Scheidemann's teacher (The Key board Music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: Its Style, Significance, and Influence [Utrecht: Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1997], reviewed by this writer in Notes 55, no. 1 [September 1998]: 95-97). Both books focus on the difficult questions of authorship and chronology that afflict works attributed to the two composers. This book presents a wealth of new information about sources, individual works, and certain issues of performance practice, and therefore will be appropriate not only for research collections but for those serving performers, especially keyboard players. Unfortunately, readers not already familiar with the music and previous relevant scholarship may be hard pressed to follow the author's dense, sometimes unidiomatic prose. Specialists will recognize that some of the inferences drawn about attribution and chronology are not clearly supported by the evidence cited. Dirksen makes little effort to situate Scheidemann and his music within their cultural-historical context, and he accepts without discussion the genre categories and analytical approaches to this music established by previous scholars, notably Werner Breig in the only previous monograph on the subject (Die Orgel - werke von Heinrich Scheidemann. Beihefte zum Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft, Bd. 3 [Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1967]). For many readers the most interesting matter may fall toward the end of the book, where a chapter on keyboard technique includes many music examples containing contemporary fingerings. Although there is no reason to think that these fingerings come from the composer, they reflect traditions distinct from what are now the betterknown English and Italian practices of the period. Also valuable is a chapter on the great organ of Hamburg's Katharinen - kirche, presided over by Scheidemann and his pupil Johann Adam Reincken, on which Bach played in 1722. Contributed by Ulf Grapenthin, this chapter shows that an existing Renaissance instrument had been essentially rebuilt early in the seventeenth century while Scheidemann's father David was organist. A fourth manual was not pres - ent until after Scheidemann's tenure, and the top note of the manuals remained a2 (without g#^sup 2^) until the 1670s; both points are relevant not only for organ registration and performance practice but for manuscript evaluation. A final chapter argues for the long retention of colorful reed-heavy, Dutch-influenced stoplists in seventeenthcentury north German organs. The remainder of the book attempts to establish a canon of works by Scheidemann and an approximate chronology through close study of their sources and texts. Preserved solely in manuscripts, the works attributed here to Scheidemann are often anonymous and without concordances. Dirksen identifies a number of copyists and provides dates for several sources, but many questions remain open in the view of this writer. Fundamental is Dirksen's view of two small tablature manuscripts in Wolfen - buttel as autographs; to these eyes the documentation for this is inconclusive (one must consult Katrin Kinder, Ein Wolfen - butteler Tabulaturautograph von Heinrich Scheidemann, Schutz-Jahrbuch 10 [1988]: 86-103, for the handwriting evidence). More over, one of the copies contains apparent errors that one would not expect from a pupil of Sweelinck (see note 71 in my review of Heinrich Scheidemann: Samtliche Werke fur Clavier (Cembalo), edited by Pieter Dirksen [Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Hartel, 2000], Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 11, no. …

Eight Simple Rules for Singing Multicultural Music

Plato said in his Republic, Music is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.1 As musicians, we know this to be true. As music educators interested in music from traditions other than our own, we see this music as a window into the soul's expression in another culture. Performing music of another can give us a direct, visceral experience that listening alone cannot. If music is to function as a bridge between cultures, as performers we must be ready to move out of our comfort zones and experience music in a completely new way. The root of the word culture is the Greek word kultus, meaning belief. The musical expressions of a come from the shared beliefs of that culture. Therefore, multiculturalism involves multiple beliefs, some of which will be different from those we hold in our native culture. In a musical context, these beliefs influence things such as what makes good singing technique, the proper time and place to perform a certain piece, who should sing a certain piece, what constitutes a good musical arrangement, and other issues of performance practice, language, and even religious beliefs.

History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music (review)

Reviewed by: History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music David Dolata History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music. By Peter Walls . Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2003. [ xiv, 184 p. ISBN 1-84383-005-1. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Until twenty or so years ago, many traditional performers and musicologists viewed performance practice (a.k.a. Historically Informed Performance or HIP) with suspicion, despite its official designation as one of musicology's subspecialties. Recently the gap between the two camps has begun to narrow, partly due to the realization that the "authenticity police" do not represent mainstream HIPsters, but also in some measure as a result of recent works by well respected scholars and performers who address specific performance practice issues in a balanced and thoughtful manner. Among the most notable of these practical sources are Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell's introduction to The Historical Performance of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Performance Practice (for music before and after 1600), edited by Howard Mayer Brown and Stanley Sadie (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), and the Early Music America series of performance practice guides for Medieval, Renaissance, and Seventeenth-century Music edited respectively by Ross Duffin (APerformer's Guide to Medieval Music [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000]), Jeffery Kite-Powell (A Performer's Guide to Renaissance Music [New York: Schirmer, 1994]), and Stewart Carter (A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music [New York: Schirmer, 1997]), the last two with revised editions in preparation. To this list should be added Clive Brown's Classical and Romantic Performing Practice from 1750- 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Several other books treat the broader philosophical controversies that performance practice seems to excite. These include Nicholas Kenyon, et. al.'s Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Richard Taruskin's Text and Act (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Paul Henry Lang's Performance and Musicology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), and Peter Kivy's Authenticities: [End Page 451] Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Two other volumes directly address the charges of those who feel threatened enough by performance practice that they go so far as to question its value: John Butt's Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and the book under review here, Peter Walls's polemic, History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music. The book is based on a series of lectures Walls presented in 2000 under the auspices of Magdalen College and calls to mind the conversational style of Stravinsky's lectures, Poetics of Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), and other such similar collections. While Butt's Playing with History appeals to the musical philosopher, Walls's book, by no means lacking in philosophical perspective, is directed toward the performing musician, the person at the center of the vortex who must ultimately make the decisions. Full of wit, humor, and clever turns of phrase, the book is a pleasure to read. Walls's direct personal style and engaging manner draws the reader into his world, and the copious musical examples bring abstract issues into sharp focus, even if many of the facsimiles appear blurred as if they were actually faxed across the ages. In his introduction, Walls evenhandedly articulates the main criticisms leveled at HIP. The chapters that follow, relatively concise, to the point, and well-organized, are devoted to detailed individual discussions of various aspects of the debate. Through an examination of Johann Sebastian Bach's Adagio from the G Minor Sonata for Solo Violin, BWV 1001, the second chapter, "Escaping Tradition, Embracing History," demonstrates the role changing personal taste plays in reception history. Cutely titled "Measure for Measure or As You Like It?," the third chapter is comprised of several case studies in support of Walls's assertion that performance practice research and actual music making are and should be entirely distinct and separate activities. On a less controversial note, chapter 4, "What's the Score?," describes the benefits of even the most minimal primary source score study and demonstrates that scores with few performance indications can still offer a great deal of useful information...

The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style (review)

INSTRUMENTS AND INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style. By W. Dean Sutcliffe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [xi, 400 p. ISBN 0-521-48140-6. $75.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Domenico Scarlatti is the greatest Spanish composer Italy has ever produced. He often inspires such curious contradictions, and aspects of his life and works remain controversial and elusive. Performers and scholars will therefore always welcome any new information and insight on this unique figure. W. Dean Sutcliffe's book represents substantial contribution to the field. The author offers comprehensive survey of the literature, an excellent account of the problems posed by the lack of sources (especially autographs), and an unflinching confrontation with the question of placing the sonatas in pairs (he is clearly not an advocate). Sutcliffe addresses issues of performance practice, explores the influence of Spanish folk music, and examines other factors that, taken together, determine how we hear and play Scarlatti's music. He justly questions the existence of four separate numbering systems for the sonatas (Longo, Kirkpatrick, Fadini, and Pestelli), and he accurately describes the extent to which the Austro-German focus of musicology has distorted the analysis and reception of Scarlatti. This problem, I might add, has also been true for other latinate composers, such as Francois Couperin and the French clavecinistes. Sutcliffe therefore covers considerable ground with the skill of an experienced scholar, but several aspects of this book diminish the impact of this otherwise valuable study. The most troubling is the uncomfortable impression that Sulcliffe has deep suspicions, if not downright antipathy, about characteristics of Scarlatti's essential compositional style. This includes the hallmark use of repeated chords, his unconventional voice leading, the rapid tempos of the majority of the sonatas, and the composer's predilection for phrase repetition and unusual formal structures. Sutcliffe's tendency to express his reservations in what I consider to be overly harsh terms exacerbates the problem. To cite few instances, he complains that the voice leading of K. 277 is crude (p. 14), and the consecutive fourths [in K. 254, have] an obviously ugly effect (p. 16). Scarlatti's gigantic sequences can be . . . infuriating and upsetting (p. 121), and his repeated chords and passages are described as idiot repetitions (p. 283) that lest our tolerance levels. My tolerance level was cerlainly tested when he hinted at some dark psychological disturbance lurking beneath these musical gestures. Writing that many forms of irrational conduct or mental illness involve repetitive behavior (p. 158), Sutcliffe suggests that were we to speculate on Scarlatti's character from the evidence of the music, we might imagine it to have been unstable or even schizophrenic (p. 35). Although I am sure this was not the author's intention, the conclusion one draws from such inflammatory statements is that he considers Scarlalli's music to be crude, ugly, compulsive, and perhaps even menially unbalanced. Sutcliffe's harsh tone often extends to his criticism of number of eminent scholars and performers, especially Ralph Kirkpatrick. Is it really appropriate, or accurate, to describe the work of this distinguished Scarlattian as incredible, if not absurd (p. 43), or to accuse him of being guilty of a fabrication? (p. vii n. 1). In an amusing twist, the author unwittingly echoes Kirkpatrick on several occasions, such as the comparison of Scarlatti's harmonic practices to those of Igor Stravinsky. Kirkpatrick once shared conversation with me that he had had with Stravinsky during rehearsals for the premiere of The Rake's Progress, in which the great Russian composer personally acknowledged the similarities between his compositional style and that of Scarlatti. …

Creative process and performance practice of interactive computer music: a performer's tale

I have had a major interest in the performance practice issues in electronic and interactive systems over the years (see, for example, Kimura 1996). As a performer/composer often presenting pieces from the classical and other contemporary acoustic violin literature in traditional settings along with electronic works, and also as a teacher of interactive computer music performance at a conservatory where my students include highly trained performers, performance practice issues in computer music come up very frequently in association with the creative process. I tend to focus on creating MaxMSP patches that address a particular musical context or situation, rather than creating an elaborate versatile and reusable MaxMSP patch and then using that patch in a particular way to make music. This paper describes a few examples of my interest in this area: (i) System Aspects: Performance Practice Issues and Room Acoustics; (ii) ‘Pragmatic’ Programming and Performance of Interactive Music; and (iii) Creative Process and Interactive Computer Music.

:The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance

This is a thorough-going study of Monteverdi's Vespers, the single most significant and most widely known musical print from before the time of J.S. Bach. The author examines Monteverdi's Vespers from multiple perspectives, combining his own research with all that is known and thought of the Vespers by other scholars. The historical origin as well as the musical and liturgical context of the Vespers are surveyed; similarly the controversial historiography of the Vespers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is scrutinized and evaluated. A series of analytical chapters attempt to clarify Monteverdi's compositional process and the relationship between music and text in the light of recent research on modal and tonal aspects of early seventeenth century music. The final section is devoted to thirteen chapters investigating performance practice issues of the early seventeenth century and their application to the Vespers, including general and specific recommendations for performance where appropriate. The book concludes with a series of informational appendices, including the psalm cursus for Vespers of all major feasts in the liturgical calendar, texts, and structural outlines for the Vespers compositions based on a cantus firmus, an analytical discography, and bibliographies of seventeenth-century musical and theoretical sources.

The "Plainsong Mass" of Reginaldus Liebert (ca. 1425): Some Practical Speculations on Speculative Practices

'Plainsong Mass' of Reginaldus Liebert (ca. 1425): Some Practical Speculations on Speculative Practices. Although remaining little known, the three-voice mass cycle of the obscure Franco-Flemish composer Reginaldus Liebert is significant historically in that it comprises settings of all the Ordinary texts (excepting Ite missa est) as well as a full set of Marian Propers. As such, it represents the most comprehensive entity surviving from the late-medieval repertoire of liturgical polyphony. By virtue of its status as a unitary composition, the Liebert Mass affords a particularly valuable perspective on the interrelated issues of performance practice and tonal organization, both of which are inevitably affected by the modern interpreter's construal of the pitch sets implied by variable accidental signatures, the elaborated plainsongs present throughout as cantus firmi, and the invoking of both notated and unnotated pitch inflections. The results of this study lead the author to argue that the tenor v...

Valerie Walden. One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840. Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv, 311 pp. ISBN 0-521-55449-7 (hardcover)

Valerie Walden. One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840. Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv, 311 pp. ISBN 0-521-55449-7 (hardcover). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 20, numéro 2, 2000, p. 1-155) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Mozart, piano concertos no. 20 in D minor, K. 466, and no. 21 in C major, K. 467

1. Introduction 2. Twentieth-century theories of Mozart's concerto form 3. First movements 4. Middle movements 5. Finales 6 Performance practice issues.

Performance Practice Issues on the BBC Third Programme

Performance Practice Issues on the BBC Third Programme