Music Practice 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.

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 …

Identity In Violin Playing On Records: Interpretation Profiles In Recordings Of Solo Bach By Early Twentiety-Century Violinists, Dorottya Fabian, Eitan Ornoy

Performance Practice Review

Performance studies relying on sound recordings as evidence have often focused on establishing trends and traditions in various periods and repertoire. So far little attention has been paid to individual artistic profiles and idiosyncratic expression. Yet if performance is as significant as the notated work, as has often been argued, musicologists must be able to show what identifies a particularly famous interpreter just as they can state what characterizes the works of a prominent composer. This paper investigates the individual differences between two famous violinists. The solo Bach recordings of Nathan Milstein and Jascha Heifetz - two of Leopold Auer's …

"Attractively Packaged But Unripe Fruit"; The Uk's Commercialization Of Musical History In The 1980s, Colin Lawson

Performance Practice Review

The decade from 1980 proved to be truly significant in the development of historical performance, as recreations of post-Baroque repertory gradually became the norm. At its close, three complete cycles of Beethoven Symphonies had been recorded on “period” instruments, implicitly demonstrating the complexity of the spectrum between practical expediency and historical accuracy. By 1991, Clive Brown was issuing a timely warning that the pedigree of many of the instruments on these recordings was of doubtful authenticity. The commercially-motivated rush to push period-instrument performance ever more rapidly into the nineteenth century did not offer much hope for the consolidation of historical …