Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice – serie

This is the first book-length study in any language dedicated specifically to lute, guitar, and vihuela performance. Written by specialists of this music, it is intended for players, teachers, and scholars who are interested both in the history of performance, and in the specific interpretation of lute, guitar and vihuela music from the end of the fifteenth century to approximately 1850. It brings to light various new ideas about performance and technique for a wide range of instruments, including the fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian lute, archlute, theorbo, French Baroque lute, vihuela, and Baroque and classical guitar, as well as for lute-accompanied English and Italian song. The articles in this book decode the unwritten traditions of these instruments, and examine various performance issues, taking a fresh, innovative look at traditional problems.

Following the collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire in Germany, a new generation of artists found a fresh environment where they might flourish. Their optimism was accompanied by an equally powerful distrust of the immediate past, for post-romanticism - and ultimately expressionism - served as symbols of a bygone era. Composers, performers, and audiences alike sought to negate their recent past in various ways: by affirming modern technology (electronic or mechanical music, sound recordings, radio, and film), exploring music of a more remote past (principally Baroque music), and celebrating popular music (particularly jazz). The essays contained in this volume address these fundamental themes. Examining the way in which German music was performed, staged, programmed, and received in the 1920s, they not only offer deeper insights into Weimar culture itself but shed light on our contemporary musical world.

The ten essays in this volume explore different aspects of the performance of instrumental works by Beethoven. Each essay discusses performance issues from Beethoven's time to the present, whether the objective be to realise a performance in an historically appropriate manner, to elucidate the interpretation of Beethoven's music by conductors and performers, to clarify transcriptions by editors or to reconstruct the experience of the listener in various different periods. Four contributions focus on the piano music while another group concentrates on Beethoven's music for strings. These chapters are complemented by an examination of Beethoven's exploitation of the developing wind choir, an evaluation of early twentieth-century recordings as pointers to early nineteenth-century performance practice and an historical survey of rescorings in Beethoven's symphonies.

Perspectives on Mozart Performance, published during the Mozart bicentennial year, is the first volume in a new series. It includes essays by distinguished musicologists and performers, each exploring a different aspect of Mozart's music in performance. Several studies consider the eighteenth-century roots of Mozart's approach to performance and examine such issues as the role of ornamentation (Paul Badura-Skoda, Frederick Neumann), improvization (Katalin Komlós), cadenzas (Christoph Wolff), and Mozart's conception of tempos in a pre-metronomic age (Jean-Pierre Marty). Two studies examine Mozart's string writing (Jaap Schroeder) and the influence of his father's remarkably popular Violinschule (Robin Stowell). An essay by Peter Williams treats Mozart's use of the chromatic fourth and performance styles associated with that figura. Finally, the later, nineteenth-century response to Mozart is explored through the study of Mendelssohn's performances of Mozart (R. Larry Todd).

From at least the eighth century and for about a thousand years the repertory of music known as Georgian chant, or plainsong, formed the largest body of written music AND was the most frequently performed and the most assiduously studied in Western civilisation. But plainsong did not follow rigid conventions. It seems increasingly clear that, whatever may have been intended with respect to uniformity and tradition, the practice of plainsong varied considerably within time and place. It is just this variation, this living quality of plainsong, that these essays address. The contributors have sought information from a wide variety of areas: liturgy, architecture, art history, secular and ecclesiastical history and hagiography, as a step towards reassembling the tesserae of cultural history into the rich mosaic from which they came.