Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Beyond The Score: Music As Performance" By Nicholas Cook, Aron Edidin

Performance Practice Review

Aron Edidin reviews and discusses Nicholas Cook's 2013 work. Cook, Nicholas. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-19-935740-6.

The Off-Board String On The Medieval Fiddle, Linda Marie Zaerr

Performance Practice Review

Drawing on explicit descriptions, iconographic representations, and contemporary narrative, this essay analyzes playing techniques and repertories plausible for one type of medieval fiddle and suggests that notions of historical fiddle performance may need to expand to accommodate the aesthetics and techniques implied by the off-board fiddle.

While it has been widely assumed that the left thumb was used to pluck the laterally divergent string described by Jerome of Moravia, the complete body of evidence suggests an alternative interpretation: the thumb can be used to stop this off-board string, extending the melodic range of the instrument down to a step below …

Commonality And Diversity In Recordings Of Beethoven’S Middle-Period String Quartets, Nancy November

Performance Practice Review

A widespread opinion in recent research about the performance of Beethoven’s works is that artists need to restore a connection to "tradition," and that recordings from the early twentieth century can help with this. However, these early recordings tell us most about the aesthetics and performance ideals of their day, and hence how Beethoven and his string quartets were received by early twentieth-century audiences. Case studies of early recordings of Beethoven middle-period quartets reveal ways in which these these performances differed, sometimes radically, from the kinds of performances Beethoven would have expected to hear, especially with regard to the use …

By Word Of Mouth: Historical Performance Comes Of Age, Ingrid E. Pearson

Performance Practice Review

Since Clive Brown’s 1991 accusation that many twentieth-century manifestations of historical performance lacked an appropriate degree of musical sensitivity, the historical performance movement has truly come of age. In the arena of Western Art music, historical performance is now an essential component of musical training and education. Successful performers must be able to seamlessly function across the widest possible range of musical styles, accommodating an equally wide gamut of tastes, both individually and collectively.

In 1982, nine years earlier, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word explored differences between oral and literate cultures. Of particular interest to …

Stravinsky, Tempo, And Le Sacre, Erica Heisler Buxbaum

Performance Practice Review

In reviews of recorded performances by others of Le sacre du printemps, Stravinsky contradicted his metronome markings and his own recorded performance tempos. His preferred tempos in the reviews encompass a range wider than the markings imply, yet more narrow than his own performance tempos suggest.

The "Not-So-Precisely Measured" Music Of The Middle Ages, Hendrik Van Der Werf

Performance Practice Review

Evidence from medieval writers, musical notation, and variant readings in the sources all suggest that troubadour and trouvere songs were performed in more or less equal note values and in a manner that presented the poetry clearly.

'Back To The Land': Performance Practice And The Classic Period, Malcom S. Cole

Performance Practice Review

Although much valuable work has been done on performance practice in the Classic period, many issues await detailed study.