Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- PART 1 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE IN MUSIC CRITICISM
- PART 2 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR WORK, COMPOSER AND NOTATION
- PART 3 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE WITHIN THE CULTURE OF THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- PART 1 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE IN MUSIC CRITICISM
- PART 2 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR WORK, COMPOSER AND NOTATION
- PART 3 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE WITHIN THE CULTURE OF THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We want to serve history only to the extent that history serves life.
NietzscheHistory has one great strength over the things a Waldzell tutor feels to be worthy of his interest: it deals with reality. Abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread.
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead GamePerhaps every work of scholarship and criticism contains a trace of autobiography, and this could hardly be truer of the present case. Much of my career has been taken up with both performance and scholarship and thus inevitably with the constant mediation between them. Moreover, much of the performance and much of the scholarship has related directly to the issue of ‘historically informed performance’ (henceforth HIP) and the debates about this concept have become particularly vigorous during the very course of my career.
When I began a dissertation on performance practice issues in Bach during the early 1980s at the University of Cambridge, the order of things seemed quite clear in the context of that faculty. Composition stood at the top of the hierarchy and performance (which had barely a place in the curriculum) at the bottom; scholarship in performance stood marginally above performance itself so long as it involved rigorous, scientific and historical methods. I could claw my way a rung or two higher by working on a Great Composer and by tying in some of the results with musical analysis (the most respected discipline below composition proper).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Playing with HistoryThe Historical Approach to Musical Performance, pp. ix - xiiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002