This handbook is not a textbook about historical performance. Nor, for that matter (and perhaps to the disappointment of some), is it intended to be a credo for the self-evident superiority of ‘historical’ playing. There is, of course, a clear logic to the aspiration to perform a composition ‘as the composer intended’. There is also much to be said for asserting that this can best be done by investigating codes of practice that try to be as the composer envisaged. There might even be a discussion of who – in practice – the composer is, and whether this comes down to an individual with pen and manuscript paper, or rather a combination of original author and performer, given that a musical work only really exists when it becomes a set of frequency vibrations. It is also apparently true (although I think the situation is prone to be overstated) that romantic performance is currently rather under-represented in terms of the synthesis of scholarship and performance. By extension, it is reasonable to assert that performance that, through ignorance, makes little attempt to satisfy these requirements is deficient.

This said, intense debates concerning what a performer ‘should’ do in this or any other musical context seem to miss the point. Through the agency of modernism, ‘classical music’ (as indicated by the ubiquitous use of this meaningless term by the non-specialist) has been pushed to increasing levels of esotericism by strictly policed codifications of ‘mainstream’ practice, by ‘new music’ that either intentionally or unintentionally alienates all but a select few, and indeed by a ‘historical performance’ project that renders much music – and in more recent times even canonical music – remote and difficult for the artist to approach with a spirit of free curiosity. The act of performance, to say nothing of the act of listening, perhaps becomes an increasingly intellectual exercise, and the number of classical musicians known to me personally who seek emotive connection not in ‘classical music’ but rather in more contemporary (‘pop’) contexts is perhaps indicative of something about which we should be concerned.