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  3. Musical Performance and Reception

This series continues the aim of Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs: to publish books centred on the history of musical instruments and the history of performance, while broadening the focus to include musical reception in relation to performance and as a reflection of period expectations and practices.

  • General Editors: John Butt, University of Cambridge, Laurence Dreyfus, King's College London

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13 results in Musical Performance and Reception

The Guitar in Victorian England
  • A Social and Musical History
  • Christopher Page
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • In 1893 Clara Lindow sang the ballad Dreamtide to her own guitar accompaniment in the Cumbrian hamlet of Lowick. A writer for the local newspaper not only admired her 'marked skill and ability' but also considered the concert to be a sign of 'the onward march of light and learning in our time'. Amateurs like Miss Lindow were at the heart of a Victorian revival of guitar playing, especially for accompanying the voice, which has never been fully acknowledged and has often been denied. This book is a ground-breaking history of the guitar and its players during the era when the Victorians were making modern Britain. The abundant newspaper record of the period, much of which is now searchable with digital tools, reveals an increasingly buoyant guitar scene from the 1860s onwards. No part of Victorian life, from palace to pavement, remained untouched by the revival.

Compositional Artifice in the Music of Henry Purcell
  • Alan Howard
  • Published online:
    30 September 2019
    Print publication:
    17 October 2019
  • Fugal invention has proved a successful line of analytical inquiry in recent studies of repertoires from Josquin to J. S. Bach. Alan Howard brings similar insights to the music of Henry Purcell, and proposes the first analytical approach to his music to examine compositional methods alongside historically contemporary theory, focusing particularly on Purcell's 'artificial' approach to imitative counterpoint. Through this methodology Howard challenges previous responses to Purcell's music that portrayed him as fundamentally conservative. This study offers fresh insights into the musical world in which Purcell lived and worked and situates Purcell's compositional concerns in the broader context of notions of artifice in Restoration culture. Howard thereby offers both a fresh analytical approach - to Purcell's early instrumental works and to his later concerted vocal music - and a critique of the reception history surrounding the fantazias and sonatas in particular.

Musical Authorship from Schütz to Bach
  • Stephen Rose
  • Published online:
    25 May 2019
    Print publication:
    30 May 2019
  • What did the term 'author' denote for Lutheran musicians in the generations between Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach? As part of the Musical Performance and Reception series, this book examines attitudes to authorship as revealed in the production, performance and reception of music in seventeenth-century German lands. Analysing a wide array of archival, musical, philosophical and theological texts, this study illuminates notions of creativity in the period and the ways in which individuality was projected and detected in printed and manuscript music. Its investigation of musical ownership and regulation shows how composers appealed to princely authority to protect their publications, and how town councils sought to control the compositional efforts of their church musicians. Interpreting authorship as a dialogue between authority and individuality, this book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore changing attitudes to the self in the era between Schütz and Bach.

The Guitar in Stuart England
  • A Social and Musical History
  • Christopher Page
  • Published online:
    09 November 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • This is the first history of the guitar during the reign of the Stuarts, a time of great political and social upheaval in England. In this engaging and original volume, Christopher Page gathers a rich array of portraits, literary works and other, previously unpublished, archival materials in order to create a comprehensive picture of the guitar from its early appearances in Jacobean records, through its heyday at the Restoration court in Whitehall, to its decline in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The book explores the passion of Charles II himself for the guitar, and that of Samuel Pepys, who commissioned the largest repertoire of guitar-accompanied song to survive from baroque Europe. Written in Page's characteristically approachable style, this volume will appeal to general readers as well as to music historians and guitar specialists.

The Guitar in Tudor England
  • A Social and Musical History
  • Christopher Page
  • Published online:
    05 June 2016
    Print publication:
    30 July 2015
  • Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher Page reconstructs the trade in imported guitars coming to the wharves of London, and pieces together the printed tutor for the instrument (probably of 1569) which ranks as the only method book for the guitar to survive from the sixteenth century. Two chapters discuss the remains of music for the instrument in tablature, both the instrumental repertoire and the traditions of accompanied song, which must often be assembled from scattered fragments of information.

The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger
  • Performing Past and Future between the Wars
  • Jeanice Brooks
  • Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    25 April 2013
  • Nadia Boulanger - composer, critic, impresario and the most famous composition teacher of the twentieth century - was also a performer of international repute. Her concerts and recordings with her vocal ensemble introduced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to unfamiliar historical works and new compositions. This book considers how gender shaped the possibilities that marked Boulanger's performing career, tracing her meteoric rise as a conductor in the 1930s to origins in the classroom and the salon. Brooks investigates Boulanger's promotion of structurally motivated performance styles, showing how her ideas on performance of historical repertory and new music relate to her teaching of music analysis and music history. The book explores the way in which Boulanger's musical practice relied upon her understanding of the historically transcendent masterwork, in which musical form and meaning are ideally joined, and shows how her ideas relate to broader currents in French aesthetics and culture.

Engaging Bach
  • The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn
  • Matthew Dirst
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    29 March 2012
  • More than any other part of Bach's output, his keyboard works conveyed the essence of his inimitable art to generations of admirers. The varied responses to this repertory - in scholarly and popular writing, public lectures, musical composition and transcription, performances and editions - ensured its place in the canon and broadened its creator's appeal. The early reception of Bach's keyboard music also continues to affect how we understand and value it, though we rarely recognize that historical continuity. Here, Matthew Dirst investigates how Bach's music intersects with cultural, social and music history, focusing on a repertory which is often overshadowed in scholarly and popular literature on Bach reception. Organized around the most productive ideas generated by Bach's keyboard works from his own day to the middle of the nineteenth century, this study shows how Bach's remarkable and long-lasting legacy took shape amid critical changes in European musical thought and practice.

Bach's Feet
  • The Organ Pedals in European Culture
  • David Yearsley
  • Published online:
    05 March 2012
    Print publication:
    19 January 2012
  • The organist seated at the king of instruments with thousands of pipes rising all around him, his hands busy at the manuals and his feet patrolling the pedalboard, is a symbol of musical self-sufficiency yielding musical possibilities beyond that of any other mode of solo performance. In this book, David Yearsley presents an interpretation of the significance of the oldest and richest of European instruments, by investigating the German origins of the uniquely independent use of the feet in organ playing. Delving into a range of musical, literary and visual sources, Bach's Feet demonstrates the cultural importance of this physically demanding mode of music-making, from the blind German organists of the fifteenth century, through the central contribution of Bach's music and legacy, to the newly-pedaling organists of the British Empire and the sinister visions of Nazi propagandists.

Histories of Heinrich Schütz
  • Bettina Varwig
  • Published online:
    05 November 2011
    Print publication:
    03 November 2011
  • Bettina Varwig places the music of the celebrated Dresden composer Heinrich Schütz in a richly detailed tapestry of cultural, political, religious and intellectual contexts. Four key events in Schütz's career - the 1617 Reformation centenary, the performance of his Dafne in 1627, the 1636 funeral composition Musikalische Exequien and the publication of his motet collection Geistliche Chormusik (1648) - are used to explore his music's resonances with broader historical themes, including the effects of the Thirty Years' War, contemporary meanings of classical mythology, Lutheran attitudes to death and the afterlife as well as shifting conceptions of time and history in light of early modern scientific advances. These original seventeenth-century circumstances are treated in counterpoint with Schütz's fascinating later reinvention in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German musical culture, providing a new kind of musicological writing that interweaves layers of historical inquiry from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Beethoven the Pianist
  • Tilman Skowroneck
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    13 May 2010
  • The widely held belief that Beethoven was a rough pianist, impatient with his instruments, is not altogether accurate: it is influenced by anecdotes dating from when deafness had begun to impair his playing. Presenting a detailed biography of Beethoven's formative years, this book reviews the composer's early career, outlining how he was influenced by teachers, theorists and instruments. Skowroneck describes the development and decline of Beethoven's pianism, and pays special attention to early pianos, their construction and their importance for Beethoven and the modern pianist. The book also includes discussions of legato and Beethoven's trills, and a complete annotated review of eyewitnesses' reports about his playing. Skowroneck presents a revised picture of Beethoven which traces his development from an impetuous young musician into a virtuoso in command of many musical resources.

Playing with History
  • The Historical Approach to Musical Performance
  • John Butt
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    30 May 2002
  • Why do we feel the need to perform music in a historically informed style? Is this need related to wider cultural concerns? In this 2002 study, John Butt sums up debates on the nature of the early music movement and historically informed performance, calling upon a seemingly inexhaustible fund of ideas gleaned from historical musicology, analytic philosophy, literary theory, historiography and theories of modernism and postmodernism. He develops the critical views of both supporters and detractors of the movement, while claiming ultimately that it has more intellectual and artistic potential than its detractors may have assumed. He also asks whether the phenomenon of historically informed performance reflects changes in the culture of western music and how it, in turn, may have influenced that culture, particularly in regard to such issues as the status of the composer, the work, intentionality and notation.

Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination
  • Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music
  • James Garratt
  • Published online:
    12 October 2009
    Print publication:
    18 July 2002
  • Focusing on the reception of Palestrina, this bold interdisciplinary study explains how and why the works of a sixteenth-century composer came to be viewed as a paradigm for modern church music. It explores the diverse ways in which later composers responded to his works and style, and expounds a provocative model for interpreting compositional historicism. In addition to presenting insights into the works of Bruckner, Mendelssohn and Liszt, the book offers fresh perspectives on the institutional, aesthetic and ideological frameworks sustaining the cultivation of choral music in this period. This publication provides an overview and analysis of the relation between the Palestrina revival and nineteenth-century composition and it demonstrates that the Palestrina revival was just as significant for nineteenth-century culture as parallel movements in the other arts, such as the Gothic revival.

Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères
  • The Changing Identity of Medieval Music
  • John Haines
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 July 2004
  • This 2004 book traces the changing interpretation of troubadour and trouvere music, a repertoire of songs which have successfully maintained public interest for eight centuries, from the medieval chansonniers to contemporary rap renditions. A study of their reception therefore serves to illustrate the development of the modern concept of 'medieval music'. Important stages include sixteenth-century antiquarianism, the Enlightenment synthesis of scholarly and popular traditions and the infusion of archaeology and philology in the nineteenth century, leading to more recent theories on medieval rhythm. More often than now, writers and performers have negotiated a compromise between historical research and a more imaginative approach to envisioning the music of troubadours and trouveres. This book points not so much to a resurrection of medieval music in modern times as to a continuous tradition of interpreting these songs over eight centuries.