M U S I C A L P E R F O R M A N C E
The intricacies and challenges of musical performance have recently attracted the attention of writers and scholars to a greater extent than ever before. Research into the performer’s experience has begun to explore such areas as practice techniques, performance anxiety and memorisation, as well as many other professional issues. Historical performance practice has been the subject of lively debate way beyond academic circles, mirroring its high profile in the recording studio and the concert hall. Reflecting the strong ongoing interest in the role of performers and performance, this History brings together research from leading scholars and historians, and, impor-tantly, features contributions from accomplished performers, whose practi-cal experiences give the volume a unique vitality. Moving the focus away from the composers and onto the musicians responsible for bringing the music to life, the History presents a fresh, integrated and innovative perspec-tive on performance history and practice, from the earliest times to today.
C O L I N L A W S O Nis Director of the Royal College of Music, London. He has an international profile as a period clarinettist and has played principal in most of Britain’s leading period orchestras, notably The Hanover Band, the English Concert and the London Classical Players, with whom he has recorded extensively and toured worldwide. He has published widely, and is co-editor, with Robin Stowell, of a series of Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music, for which he co-authored an introductory volume and contributed a book on the early clarinet.
R O B I N S T O W E L L is Professor of Music and Director of the Centre for
Research into Historically Informed Performance at Cardiff University. He is also a violinist/period violinist, and he has performed, broadcast and recorded with the Academy of Ancient Music and other period ensembles. He is the author of Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (1985), and his more recent major publications include The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet (2003) and The Early Violin and Viola (2001).
H I S T O R Y O F
MUSICAL
PERFORMANCE
* C OL I N L A W S O Nand
R O B I N S T O W E L LSingapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, CambridgeCB2 8RU, UK
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List of illustrations ix List of musical examples x
Notes on contributors xiii Editors’ preface xxi
P A R T I P E R F O R M A N C E T H R O U G H
H I S T O R Y 1
1 . Performance today 3
N I C H O L A S K E N Y O N
2 . Political process, social structure and musical performance in Europe since 1450 35
W I L L I A M W E B E R
3 . The evidence 63
R O B I N S T O W E L L
4 . The performer and the composer 105
C O R E Y J A M A S O N
5 . The teaching of performance 135
N A T A S H A L O G E S A N D C O L I N L A W S O N
6 . Music and musical performance: histories in disjunction? 169
D A V I D W R I G H T
P A R T I I P R E
-
R E N A I S S A N C EP E R F O R M A N C E 207
7 . The Ancient World 209
E L E O N O R A R O C C O N I
8 . Performance before c. 1430: an overview 231
J O H N H A I N E S
9 . Vocal performance before c. 1430 248
J E R E M Y S U M M E R L Y
10 . Instrumental performance before c. 1430 261
S T E F A N O M E N G O Z Z I
11 . Case study: Guillaume de Machaut, ballade 34,‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’ 279
J O H N H A I N E S
P A R T I I I P E R F O R M A N C E I N T H E R E N A I S S A N C E
(
C. 1 4 3 0
–1600)
29512 . Performance in the Renaissance: an overview 297
J O N B A N K S
13 . Vocal performance in the Renaissance 318
T I M O T H Y J. MCG E E
14 . Instrumental performance in the Renaissance 335
K E I T H P O L K
15 . Case study: Seville Cathedral’s music in performance, 1549–1599 353
O W E N R E E S
P A R T I V P E R F O R M A N C E I N T H E S E V E N T E E N T H
C E N T U R Y 375
16 . Performance in the seventeenth century: an overview 377
T I M C A R T E R
17 . Vocal performance in the seventeenth century 398
R I C H A R D W I S T R E I C H
18 . Instrumental performance in the seventeenth century 421
D A V I D P O N S F O R D
19 . Case study: Monteverdi, Vespers (1610) 448
P A R T V P E R F O R M A N C E I N T H E
‘
L O N GE I G H T E E N T H C E N T U R Y
’
47120 . Performance in the‘long eighteenth century’: an overview 473
S I M O N MCV E I G H
21 . Vocal performance in the‘long eighteenth century’ 506
J O H N P O T T E R
22 . Instrumental performance in the‘long eighteenth century’ 527
P E T E R W A L L S
23 . Case study: Mozart, Symphonies in Eflat major K543, G minor K550 and C major K551 552
C O L I N L A W S O N
P A R T V I P E R F O R M A N C E I N T H E N I N E T E E N T H
C E N T U R Y 575
24 . Performance in the nineteenth century: an overview 577
M I C H A E L M U S G R A V E
25 . Vocal performance in the nineteenth century 611
W I L L C R U T C H F I E L D
26 . Instrumental performance in the nineteenth century 643
I A N P A C E
27 . Case study: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 696
R O B I N S T O W E L L
P A R T V I I T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y A N D
B E Y O N D 723
28 . Musical performance in the twentieth century and beyond: an overview 725
S T E P H E N C O T T R E L L
29 . Vocal performance in the twentieth century and beyond 752
30 . Instrumental performance in the twentieth century and beyond 778
R O G E R H E A T O N
31 . Case study: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppen für drei Orchester 798
W I L L I A M M I V A L P A R T V I I I 815 32 . The future? 817 C O L I N L A W S O N A N D R O B I N S T O W E L L Select bibliography 834 Index 894
5.1a–c. Illustrations of the façade, the concert hall and stair-well of the building Hochschule für Musik und Theater‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’, Leipzig. Bibliothek/Archiv, A, II. 3/1: from the prospectus Das Königliche Konservatorium der Musik zu Leipzig, 1900 page155
8.1. Conventional view of medieval music repertoires 232
8.2. Revised view of medieval music repertoires 234 8.3. Standard medieval repertoires revised 234 10.1. Country scene with players of tabor and pipe, and
gittern. From Lyon Municipal Library, MS 27, fol. 13r (fourteenth century) (Photo, Lyon Municipal Library, Didier Nicole) 266
10.2. Giovanni del Biondo, Musical angels (fourteenth century), showing two players of organette andfiddle (courtesy of the National Museums, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery) 273
10.3. Glorification of St Francis (attributed to Antonio Vite, School of Giotto); detail showing a wind ensemble (two shawms and bagpipe), organistrum and psaltery (fourteenth century). Church of St Francesco, Pistoia, Italy 277
15.1. Medallion on the choir stand in the coro of Seville Cathedral, showing a group of singers 362 15.2. Medallion on the choir stand in the coro of Seville
Cathedral, showing the ministriles 364
22.1. Haydn instrumental works– percentage distribution by key 538
22.2. Mozart instrumental music– percentage distribution by key 538
22.3. Chopin distribution of works by key 539
8.1. Opening of the lament for Charlemagne page 238 8.2. Opening of‘Bele Yolanz en ses chambres seoit’
(Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, f. fr. 20050, fol. 64v) 239
8.3. Prose of the Ass from the Feast of Fools 243 8.4. Banquet song from Renart le nouvel 244 9.1. The opening of Léonin’s Viderunt omnes transcribed
in measured rhythm (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1, fol. 99) 257 9.2. The opening of Léonin’s Viderunt omnes
transcribed as free rhythm (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1 fol. 99) 258 10.1. In seculum viellatoris (Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek,
MS. Lit. 115, fol. 63v), opening. The example is modelled after G. A. Anderson (ed.), Compositions of the Bamberg Manuscript (American Institute of Musicology, 1977), pp. 138–9 (used by permission of the American Institute of Musicology,
Inc., Middleton, WI) 274
10.2. T’Andernaken al op den Rijn (Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, MS. 87, fol. 198v–199r), opening. The example is modelled after T’Andernaken: Ten Settings in Three, Four, and Five Parts, ed. R. Taruskin (Coconut Grove, FL: Ogni Sorte Editions, 1981), pp. 9–10 276
11.1. Machaut’s ballade 34, ‘Quant Theseus / Ne quier veoir’, edited from the Reina Codex (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, nouv. acqu. fr. 6771, fols. 54v–55r) 288
15.1. Guerrero, Duo Seraphim, opening 373 18.1. Froberger, Toccata 3, bars 5–7 428 18.2. Froberger, Toccata 1, bars 1–3 429
18.3. Louis Couperin, opening of Prélude à l’imitation de Mr. Froberger 429
18.4. Buxtehude, Praeludium in G minor (ostinato theme, fugue subjects and time signatures) 430 22.1. Francesco Geminiani, The Art of playing on the
Violin (London, 1751), EssempioVIII,
section 20 546
25.1a. Schumann,‘Die beiden Grenadiere’ 618 25.1b. Handel, Judas Maccabeus,‘Sound an
Alarm’ 618
25.2a. Bellini, La sonnambula,‘Ah, non credea mirarti’ 619
25.2b. Verdi, La traviata,‘Pura siccome un angelo’ 619
25.3. Verdi, Ernani,‘O sommo Carlo’ 621 25.4a. Portugal (Portogallo), La morte di Mitridate,
‘Teneri e cari affetti’ 626
25.4b. Cimarosa, Penelope,‘Ah, serena il mesto ciglio’ 626
25.5. Pacini, Niobe, Didone,‘Il soave e bel contento’ 627
25.6. Mercadante, Andronico,‘Soave immagine’ 627 25.7. De Garaudé, Méthode de chant 628
25.8. Appoggiatura-based ornamental patterns in Bellini, Norma, and Verdi, Nabucco 628 25.9. Zingarelli, Giulietta e Romeo,‘Sommo ciel’ 629 25.10a–c. Nineteenth-century final cadenzas 630
25.11. Verdi, Ernani,‘Infelice, e tu credevi’ 630 25.12. Bellini, Norma, three fragments from the role of
Pollione as altered by Giovanni Mario 632 25.13. Facsimile from García the younger’s
Treatise 639
25.14. Haydn,‘She never told her love’ (Hob.
XXVIa:34) 641
26.1. Beethoven, String Quartet in Bflat Op. 130, opening of fourth movement 646
26.2. Schubert, Symphony No. 9 in C D944, finale 647
26.3a. Schubert, String Quartet in G D887,first
movement 649
26.3b. Schubert, Impromptu D899 No. 2 649 26.4a. Paganini, Violin Concerto No. 1 in Eflat major,
opening 650
26.4b. Paganini, Violin Concerto No. 1 in Eflat major, opening, as played 650
26.5. Portamento as suggested in treatises of Habeneck and de Bériot 651
26.6. Liszt, Grande Fantaisie de Bravoure sur la Clochette de Paganini 653
26.7. Chopin, Waltz in Aflat Op. 69 No. 1, execution as described by Kleczynski 654
26.8. Berlioz, Overture to King Lear, bars 364–8 661 26.9. Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto Op. 64, Allegro
molto appassionato. Edition of David, with implied portamenti notated 666
26.10. Schumann, Fantasy Op. 17 667
26.11. Robert Schumann, Arabeske Op. 18 668 26.12a. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, opening 673 26.12b. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, towards end offirst
‘movement’ 674
26.12c. Liszt, Sonata in B minor, conclusion 674 26.13. Liszt, Consolation No. 3 677
26.14. César Franck, Violin Sonata, from fourth
movement 679
26.15. Wagner, Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, bars 89–90, 97–8 681
26.16. Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, Adagio. Funeral Music 684
26.17. Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 119 No. 1 685 26.18a. Brahms, Ein deutsches Requiem, opening of seventh
movement,‘Selig sind die Toten’ 686
26.18b. Brahms, String Quartet in C minor Op. 51 No. 1, third movement. 686
26.18c. Brahms, Violin Concerto,first movement, bars 347–52, 460–3, solo part 687
JO N BA N K S combines a career as a Senior Lecturer in Music at Anglia Ruskin
University with a full performing schedule. He specialises in the medieval harp and gittern as well as Oriental string instruments such as the santur and qanun, and has toured and recorded with groups including the Burning Bush, the Dufay Collective, Red Byrd, Joglaresa, Al-Ashekeen, the Jocelyn Pook Ensemble, Sirinu and the Tivoli Café Band. Recent publications include a book, The Instrumental Consort Repertory of the Fifteenth Century, and current research interests include a project on the repertoires of music preserved on Oriental clocks. Other activities include regular performances at the Globe Theatre, work with Iranian and Middle
Eastern ensembles and freelance recording forfilm and TV.
TI MCA R T E Rwas born in Australia and studied in the United Kingdom. He is the
author of the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1987),
Jacopo Peri (1561–1633): His Life and Works (1989), Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy (1992), Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence and Monteverdi and his Contemporaries (both 2000), Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre (2002),
and‘Oklahoma!’ The Making of an American Musical (2007). In 2001 he moved from
Royal Holloway, University of London, to become David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was chair of the Music Department from 2004 to 2009. He is currently preparing an edition of Kurt Weill’s first musical composed in the US, Johnny Johnson (to a play by Paul Green).
ST E P H E N CO T T R E L L is Professor of Music at City University, London. His
research interests fall into three interrelated areas: ethnographic approaches to musicians and music-making, especially within the Western art-music tradition; the study of musical instruments, particularly the saxophone; and the study and analysis of musical performance. A monograph on Professional Music-Making in London was published in 2004, and a further volume on The Saxophone is forth-coming. He has contributed to a range of other publications, including the British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology, and Twentieth-century Music. He is an associate editor of the latter, and on the executive committee of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. He is also an Artistic Adviser to the record label
Saxophone Classics. As a performer he has released several CDs of contemporary music, both as a soloist and previously as the leader of the Delta Saxophone Quartet.
WI L L CR U T C H F I E L D is the Director of Opera for the Caramoor International
Music Festival in New York. He has also served as Music Director of the Opera de Colombia (Bogotá) and Principal Guest Conductor of the Polish National Opera (Warsaw), and has been a guest conductor in various theatres, specialising in Italian opera. He has written on music for the Grove Dictionaries of Music, the New York Times, the New Yorker and various academic publications, and has served on the faculties of the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music and the Mannes College of Music.
JO H N HA I N E S is Professor at the University of Toronto, where he is
cross-appointed at the Faculty of Music and Centre for Medieval Studies. His publica-tions include Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Medieval Song in Romance Languages (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
RO G E RHE A T O N, clarinettist and conductor, has worked closely with some of the
world’s leading composers including Henze, Feldman, Bryars, Radulescu and Volans, and performs with such groups as the Fidelio and Archduke Trios, Kreutzer and Smith String Quartets. He was a member of the London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern, and has been a member of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble since the early 1980s. He was Music Director and Conductor of Rambert Dance Company during the 1990s, Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (1982–94) and is currently Professor of Music at Bath Spa University. His most recent CDs include music by Tom Johnson (Ants/Silenzio), clarinet quintets by Morton Feldman and Christopher Fox (Metier), Hugh Wood’s chamber music (Toccata) and Schoenberg’s (Greissle) Clarinet Sonata (Clarinet Classics). His book The Versatile Clarinet was published in 2006.
CO R E YJA M A S O Nis a harpsichordist and conductor and is artistic director of the
San Francisco Bach Choir and principal keyboardist of the American Bach Soloists. He has performed with a variety of ensembles including LA Opera, San Francisco Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and has appeared in recordings with American Bach Soloists, the violinist Giles Apap and the ensemble El Mundo. He is also co-director and conductor of Théâtre Comique, an ensemble that special-ises in recreating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American musical theatre according to historical performance practices. He teaches historical key-boards at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he is director of the Historical Performance Program.
NI C H O L A SKE N Y O Nis Managing Director of the Barbican Centre, London. He
was Controller of BBC Radio 3 1992–8 and Director of the BBC Proms 1996– 2007. He was a music critic of the New Yorker 1979–82, Editor of Early Music 1983–92 and edited the influential volume Authenticity and Early Music (1988). He is the author of The BBC Symphony Orchestra 1930–80 (1981), Simon Rattle: From Birmingham to Berlin (rev. edn 2001), The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart (2005) and The Faber Pocket Guide to Bach (2011). He has been a council member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a Governor of Wellington College, and is now a member of Arts Council England and a Board member of English National Opera and Sage Gateshead, and a Trustee of Dartington Hall.
CO L I N LA W S O N is Director of the Royal College of Music, London. He has an
international profile as a period clarinettist and has played principal in most of Britain’s leading period orchestras, notably The Hanover Band, the English Concert and the London Classical Players, with whom he has recorded extensively
and toured worldwide. Described by Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung as‘a brilliant,
absolutely world-class player’ he has appeared as a soloist in many international venues, including London’s major concert halls and New York’s Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. His recent discography includes two volumes of sonatas by Lefèvre in their original scoring for C clarinet and cello. Colin has published widely, especially for Cambridge University Press. With Robin Stowell, he is co-editor of a series of Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music, for which he co-authored an introductory volume and contributed a book on the early clarinet.
NA T A S H ALO G E Sgained her B.Mus. in piano performance at the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama, and her M.Mus. at King’s College, London. She completed her doctoral thesis at the Royal Academy of Music, before taking up her current post as Assistant Head of Programmes at the Royal College of Music. She has published articles on Brahms’s Lieder in Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2006), Indiana Theory Review (2005) and in Music and Literature in German Romanticism (2004). Natasha also works as an accompanist, and has performed in St John’s, Smith Square, London and the Holywell Music Room, Oxford; she has also broad-cast live for BBC Radio 3.
TI M O T H YJ . MCGE Eis a music historian whose areas of research include
perform-ance practices before 1700 and Canadian music. His latest book, The Ceremonial Musicians of Late Medieval Florence was published in 2009. Other publications include The Sound of Medieval Song (1998), Medieval Instrumental Dances (1989), Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Performer’s Guide (1985) and The Music of Canada (1985). In 2002 he retired from the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Currently
he is an Honorary Professor and Adjunct Professor in the departments of English and History at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
SI M O NMCVE I G His Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. He
has published extensively on eighteenth-century instrumental music and on music in Britain, including Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (1993) and, with Jehoash Hirshberg, The Italian Solo Concerto 1700–1760: Rhetorical Strategies and Style History (2004). He also co-edited with Susan Wollenberg a volume of essays entitled Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004). Current research projects include a study of the British symphony in the eighteenth century and a collaboration with Leanne Langley on London concert life around 1900. In addition he is a Baroque and Classical violinist, with a particular interest in the north Italian violin repertoire and in the development of the concert string quartet.
JA N E MA N N I N G is an internationally known soprano, specialising in
twentieth-and twenty-first-century music, who has given more than 300 world premieres. An extensive recording catalogue includes many twentieth-century classics. She founded her own ensemble, Jane’s Minstrels, in 1988 and still enjoys an active career. Currently Visiting Professor at Kingston University, her academic work includes three terms as Visiting Professor at Mills College, six years as Honorary Professor at Keele University, and many shorter international residencies, includ-ing seminars at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale Universities. Her published works include two volumes of New Vocal Repertory, a chapter in The Messiaen Companion, and the forthcoming Voicing Pierrot, the product of three years of research at Kingston University funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of York, Keele and Durham and is a Fellow of both the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music.
ST E F A N O ME N G O Z Z I is Associate Professor of Music at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. His research focuses on the history of music theory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. His publications include The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory: Guido of Arezzo between Myth and History (2010). WI L L I A M MI V A L is a composer, broadcaster, writer and teacher and is Head of
Composition at the Royal College of Music in London. He has written works for, amongst others, the Belcea String Quartet, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Welsh Chamber Orchestra and the harpsichordist Sophie Yates. As a broadcaster he has been a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 3’s CD Review and Building a
Library and was invited to discuss the concept of musical ‘resonance’ on BBC
MI C H A E LMU S G R A V Eis Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of London,
Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music, and serves on the graduate
faculty of the Juilliard School, New York. Hisfields of research are nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century German music, and English concert life in the same period. He is author and editor of six books on Brahms, including (with Bernard D. Sherman) Performing Brahms. Early Evidence of Performance Style (2003); this won the 2003 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Best Research in Recorded Classical Music. His recent work includes a biography of Robert Schumann. He is author of The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (1995), and editor of George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture (2003). He is also a member of the
Trägerverein of the‘Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe’, for which he has edited
the two orchestral serenades Op. 11 and Op. 16 (2006); other editions include the
Liebeslieder Waltzes of Brahms in different versions for Carus Verlag and Edition
Peters, and Schumann’s Piano Concerto, also for Peters (2009). He received the Fellowship of the Royal College of Music in 2005.
IA NPA C Eis a pianist and musicologist specialising in areas of nineteenth-century
performance practice, the post-1945 avant-garde, and issues of music and society. He is a Lecturer in Music at City University, London, and has previously taught at Dartington College of Arts and the Universities of Southampton and Cardiff. He has published many articles, and co-edited the volume Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy (2008). His book Brahms Performance Practice: Documentary, Analytic and Interpretive Approaches was published in 2010. As a pianist he has played in over twenty countries, recorded numerous CDs, and given world premieres of over 150 works, by composers including Richard Barrett, James Dillon, Pascal Dusapin, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Horatiu Radulescu, Frederic Rzewski and Gerhard Stäbler. He is also writing a book on the history of instru-mental performance between 1815 and 1890, as well as researching the emergence of the avant-garde in West Germany after 1945.
AN T H O N Y PA Y N E, composer, was born in London and studied at Durham
University. His commissions include three orchestral works for the BBC Proms, and works for the BBC Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta and Cheltenham Festival. His discography includes two complete CDs of chamber music. He has published books on Schoenberg, Frank Bridge and Elgar’s Third Symphony, the completion of which, in 1997, brought him international acclaim, as well as South Bank and Evening Standard awards. It has been performed by the Philadelphia and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, as well as all the major UK orchestras. There are now six CD recordings in existence. He has been Visiting Professor at Mills College, California and Composition Tutor at the New South Wales Conservatorium, and is a frequent broadcaster for the BBC. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Birmingham, Durham and Kingston, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Music.
KE I T H PO L K has produced numerous articles and several books on instrumental
music of the Renaissance. He is also a French horn player, having performed with the San Diego Symphony, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Boston Baroque, and the Smithsonian Chamber Players, among others. He is Professor Emeritus, University of New Hampshire, and has also taught at Brandeis University, the New England Conservatory and Regents College, London.
DA V I DPO N S F O R D is a scholar, organist and harpsichordist, and an authority on
keyboard music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An organ scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he studied the organ with Peter Hurford, Lionel Rogg and Piet Kee, and the harpsichord with Kenneth Gilbert and Gustav
Leonhardt. He is an Associate Lecturer at Cardiff University, where he conducts
the University Choir and the University Chamber Orchestra. He also teaches the organ and harpsichord at Bristol University, and gives series of lectures at Madingley Hall, Cambridge. Recent recordings include Bach’s complete violin
sonatas with Jacqueline Ross,‘Parthenia’ (1612), J. S. Bach’s Clavierübung Part 3,
and the complete Handel recorder sonatas with Alan Davis. He has recently published an edition of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (2007) and French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV (2011).
JO H NPO T T E Ris a singer and writer. He was a member of the Hilliard Ensemble for
many years and currently sings with the Dowland Project, Red Byrd, and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble. He collaborates with a number of instrumentalists and perform-ance artists. He records for ECM and has an eclectic discography of some 150 titles
which includefive gold discs and several Grammy nominations. He is the author of
Vocal Authority (1998) and Tenor: History of a Voice (2009), edited The Cambridge Companion to Singing (2000) and has contributed to several Cambridge Histories. OW E N RE E S specialises in Spanish, Portuguese and English sacred music of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is Reader in Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of the Queen’s College. Previously he held posts at St Peter’s College and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and at the University of Surrey. He has published studies of the music of Cristóbal de Morales, Francisco Guerrero and William Byrd, and of musical sources and repertoires from Portugal and Spain. His first book, Polyphony in Portugal, considers music at the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, Portugal, and he is co-editor (with Bernadette Nelson) of Cristóbal de Morales: Sources, Influences, Reception. His work as a scholar regularly relates closely to his performances and recordings; he directs Contrapunctus, the Choir of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and the Cambridge Taverner Choir.
EL E O N O R A RO C C O N I’S research interests focus on Ancient Greek Music and
the supervision of Professor Andrew Barker. Since 1999 she has been working for the Faculty of Musicology in Cremona (University of Pavia), where she is a Lecturer in Greek Language and Literature. Since 2000 she has been a member of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology (ISGMA), and in 2008 she
became a member of the ‘Kommission für antike Literatur und lateinische
Tradition’ within the ‘Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften’. She is
charter member of‘MOISA: International Society for the Study of Greek and
Roman Music and of its Cultural Heritage’. Among her publications is Le parole delle Muse (2003).
RO B I N ST O W E L Lis Professor of Music and Director of the Centre for Research
into Historically Informed Performance at Cardiff University. Educated at
Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music, he is also a violinist/period violinist, and he has performed, broadcast and recorded with the Academy of Ancient Music and other period ensembles. Since his pioneering book Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (1985) he has published widely on issues of performance practice,
orga-nology, music of the‘long eighteenth century’, violinists, chamber music and string
playing in general. His more recent major publications include The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet (2003), The Early Violin and Viola (2001), a mono-graph on Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (1998) and a co-authored volume (with
Colin Lawson) on historical performance (1999), thefirst of a series of which he is
co-editor.
JE R E M Y SU M M E R L Y is a conductor, musicologist, broadcaster and recording
producer. He studied music as an undergraduate at Oxford University and
musicology as a postgraduate at King’s College, London. He is founder-director
of Oxford Camerata and the Royal Academy Consort, has conducted almostfifty
original commercial recordings of music spanning nine centuries, and has direc-ted choirs and orchestras in locations as far afield as San Francisco and Melbourne, Helsinki and Cape Town. He has edited four volumes of medieval and Renaissance music for Faber Music, presents programmes for BBC Radios 3 and 4, and produces location recordings for Hyperion Records and Naxos. He is the recipient of a European Cultural Prize and is an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music.
JO N A T H A NWA I N W R I G H T is Professor and Head of the Department of Music at
the University of York. He is a musicologist and performer and from 1996 to 2001 he was Director of the Girls’ Choir at York Minster. His research interests focus upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Italian Music and his pub-lications include Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England (1997) and From Renaissance to Baroque (ed. with Peter Holman, 2005), and his edition of Richard
Dering’s Latin Motets for 1–3 voices and continuo was published in 2008 in the series Musica Britannica.
PE T E RWA L L Sis Emeritus Professor of Music at Victoria University of Wellington
and from 2002–2011 was Chief Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. A Baroque violinist and conductor, he is the author of Music in the English Courtly Masque (1996), History, Imagination and the Performance of Music (2003) and numerous articles on historical performance practice. He is the editor of Baroque Music (2011) in the Ashgate series The Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice and of two volumes of treatises in the Geminiani Opera Omnia (General Editor, Christopher Hogwood).
WI L L I A MWE B E R, Professor of History Emeritus at California State University in
Long Beach, has written Music and the Middle Class (1975/2003), The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992), and The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (2008). He edited Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics and The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914 (2005). He has been a member of doctoral committees in France, Finland and Canada as well as the United States and is an Associate of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles.
RI C H A R DWI S T R E I C His a scholar, singer and teacher whose work centres on the
cultural and social history of music-making in Europe in the period between about 1500 and 1800. More specifically, he investigates how vocal performance of all kinds contributes to the construction of individual and collective identities. His book Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance was published in 2007, as was The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, co-edited with John Whenham; he is also co-editor, with Iain Fenlon, of The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music. He has an international profile as a singer of both early and contemporary music, specialising in the performance of fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century solo and ensemble song. He is Professor of Music History and Dean of Research and Enterprise at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
DA V I D WR I G H T’S recent work has focused on British musical life in the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly its institutional, social and concert history aspects. His publications include revisionist accounts of the founding of the Royal College of Music, nineteenth-century music examination culture, the London Sinfonietta and the Prom seasons of Sir William Glock. With Jenny Doctor and Nicholas Kenyon he edited The Proms: A New History (2007). He is writing a social and cultural history of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. He was formerly Reader in the Social History of Music at the Royal College of Music.
Editors’ preface
Over the past generation the intricacies and challenges of musical performance have attracted the attention of writers and scholars to a greater extent than ever before. The net has been cast widely, as research into the performer’s experi-ence has begun to explore such areas as practice techniques, performance anxiety and memorisation, as well as professional issues such as alcohol and drug abuse. There has even been greater recognition that a true understanding of musical excellence draws fruitfully upon such diverse fields as exercise science, psychophysiology, sports psychology, cognitive science and medicine. Furthermore, a relatively recent sub-discipline loosely embraced by the term ‘performance studies’ has circled around a large range of subject matter while not always fully engaging the attention of the executants themselves. At the same time, historical performance practice has been the subject of lively debate way beyond academic circles, mirroring its high profile in the recording studio and the concert hall. Histories of music nevertheless continue stubbornly to be based on composers and their achievements rather than on those musicians who have been responsible for bringing the music to life. Like Heinrich Schenker, many theorists have considered‘the mechanical realization of the work of art . . . superfluous’, not least because ‘a composition does not require a performance in order to exist’.1
Whatever the reason, ‘we have regarded performance as a totally secondary aspect of music, merely a clothing or a realisation of“the real thing”, which are the written dots on the page’.2The complex relationship of score, musical work and performance demands a more flexible and detailed approach. ‘For generations, we wrote the story of music as the history of compositions. But it is surely a mistake to think that music actually exists on library shelves in weighty collected editions. It is the history of performance that has shaped the course of music, and the history of
1 H. Schenker, The Art of Performance, ed. H. Esser, trans. I. S. Scott, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 3. 2 N. Kenyon,‘Musical Tradition in a Time of Anxiety’, Twelfth Leverhulme Memorial Lecture, The Leverhulme Trust (2005), p. 6.
performance has never been written. The history of repertories and institu-tions and taste and reception is only beginning to be written.’3
The Cambridge History of Musical Performance takes up the challenge, aspiring to be nothing less than the largest and most comprehensive history of musical performance to be published in the English language. Apart from Frederick Dorian’s The History of Music in Performance (New York, 1942), a now outdated book and of limited value, it can reasonably be claimed that there has been no previous publication on the subject, and certainly none matching the scope of the content and scholarly expertise represented within its pages. A collabora-tive project by leading music scholars, historians and practitioners, it seeks to trace the rich panorama of performance history, conventions and practices from the Ancient World to the present day, aiming to provide not only an invaluable and up-to-date source of reference about the subject but also an appreciation of the historical interrelationship of style and interpretation during the various musical epochs.
The format of this volume aligns with others in the‘Cambridge History’ series. It reflects the research and performance experience of an international authorship, presenting a synthetic historical overview of a fascinating and complex subject that demands distinctive treatment. Much of the book addresses performance and performance practices in specific periods of history from times ancient to modern. From the Middle Ages onwards, an overview chapter for each period lays the historical foundations on which the immedi-ately succeeding chapters are built, devoted respectively to vocal and instru-mental performance. Case studies outline the performance history and the performance practice issues involved in interpreting a particular work or works from six of the periods under scrutiny. By way of introduction to this investigation of chronological developments, the opening chapters address broader issues that are immediately relevant to the performance of music, focusing respectively upon ‘Performance today’, ‘Political process, Social structure and musical performance in Europe since 1450’, ‘The evidence’, ‘The performer and the composer’, ‘The teaching of performance’, and ‘Music and musical performance: histories in disjunction?’
With classical music increasingly being challenged in our society by pop music, world musics and a vast range of alternative mass entertainment, advocacy is clearly an important aspect of any performer’s work. Yet the digital age has brought new opportunities, as the ways in which musical performance is disseminated have become subject to radical change. Contributors discuss these technological developments along with other performance-related topics
such as repertoires, audiences, criticism, careers, patronage and venues. An analysis of the complex and ever-changing relationship between composers and performers centres upon several areas of enquiry such as notational con-ventions, leadership roles and the cult of personality. Performance through the ages has been subject to a variety of didactic practices, often focusing on musical learning within institutions, whether church, court, university or conservatoire. An appropriate curriculum for performers beyond the immedi-ate study of music has been promulgimmedi-ated in many different contexts, one eighteenth-century source prescribing for music students ‘the whole of worldly wisdom, as well as mathematics, poetry, rhetoric and many lan-guages’.4This idealism scarcely found long-term favour, though in more recent
times theory and analysis have gradually been supplemented by a host of other performance-related subjects, such as acoustics, performance practice, psychol-ogy and world music. In addition, the increasing interaction of performers with their communities has brought into focus the benefits of music to dis-advantaged members of society.
Recording has made musical performance durable, its natural evanescence captured and preserved by technology. No longer is music’s sound necessarily inseparable from the actions of the performers creating it, with a perishability once described by Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) as‘leaving behind no tangible, vendible commodity’.5
And social, economic and cultural change after Smith’s day – with new expectations of a more leisured society for its edification and entertainment – meant that the virtuoso eventually became a social achiever, acclaimed for his skills and exploited for his marketability. This was a new situation compared with Smith’s observation (1776) that being a professional performer was an essentially discreditable occupation,‘a sort of public prostitution’. Such change over so short a time underlines the advis-ability of examining concepts of canon, repertoire and music reception in relation to the ways in which musical performance has been marketed and distributed. Traditionally, music was listened to within some sort of social context, such as a concert or a liturgical setting. This experience generated a collective aesthetic response in groups of listeners, giving rise to a common understanding of what constituted a canon of exemplary works. But today’s digital miniaturisation, and the unparalleled choice of recorded repertoire now available, puts consumers (with their own individual sensibilities and musical preferences) in complete control of what they listen to, when they listen and whether they listen to favourite moments or an entire work. Increasingly,
4 P. Poulin,‘A view of eighteenth-century musical life and training: Anton Stadler’s “Musick Plan” ’, Music & Letters, 71 (1990), 215–24.
therefore, today’s listening habits reflect little experience of music’s original social environments and conventions. This moves us away from the old accept-ance of a hierarchy of works to more contingent and less codified musical values– effectively a disruption that challenges established patterns and ideol-ogies of reception, and questions the continuing relevance of the canon.
Given that musical performance takes place within the elusive medium of sound there is of course a sense in which much of its history before the invention of ‘non-human storage of music’6has entirely disappeared.‘Time and again, therefore, earlier epochs characterize performance as something valid only for the present, or for veiled, mediated recollection; and though performance may have been reflected, represented and even to some extent “recorded” in literary or visual art, music in performance was not essentially open to scientific or even philosophical inspection.’7When Thomas Edison
shouted‘Mary had a little lamb’ into a phonograph in 1877, the musical world began to change; some twenty-five years later the recordings of Enrico Caruso acquired a mass market and the nature of the evidence for performance was revolutionised. Early recordings have recently attracted a great deal of atten-tion, as have the attitudes and achievements of those pioneering musicians who embraced studio work with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance during the first half of the twentieth century. Among pianists Wilhelm Kempff recognised the opportunity to achieve a perfect interpretation and over his long life became a studio master, exclusive to Deutsche Grammophon from 1935 until his death in 1991; yet on stage he was all too prone to dis-appoint, unable to reproduce the raptness or subtle variants of colour. During his lifetime, the art of recording and live performance became radically different in scope and intent.8By contrast, Artur Schnabel argued that recording went against the very nature of performance, by a dehumanising elimination of contact between player and listener. Though later convinced to record, he found the process difficult; ‘I suffered agonies and was in a state of despair. . . . Everything was artificial – the light, the air, the sound – and it took me quite a long time to get the company to adjust some of their equipment to music.’9
In Beethoven and Schubert an inspirational spontaneity (unfettered by insistence on accuracy) was his legacy.
6 J. Dunsby, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 19, p. 346, art.‘Performance’.
7 Ibid.
8 N. Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness: the Secret Life & Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry, London, Allen Lane, 2007, p. 8.
9 A. Schnabel, My Life and Music, Gerrards Cross, Colin Smythe, 1970, p. 98, cited in Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness, p. 9.
In charting what he regards as the death of the classical recording industry, Norman Lebrecht has observed that Karajan, Pavarotti and Solti are the top-selling classical artists (respectively 200, 100 and 50 million records). He claims that classical sales as a whole amount to somewhere between 1 and 1.3 billion records, a similar number to the Beatles. Lebrecht’s all-time classical chart is topped by Solti’s Ring Cycle (18 million), the Three Tenors (14 million) and I Musici’s Four Seasons (9.5 million). He excludes non-classical or crossover submissions such as Titanic (25 million) and Charlotte Church (10 million).10 It is worth recalling here that much of today’s terminology had no place in earlier times, with ‘crossover’ itself an obvious example. The same caveat applies to words such as‘genius’ or ‘masterpiece’. In other words, historical evidence for performance needs to be read in the spirit of its own times. Audiences for performers before the age of recording inevitably had different priorities. The appearance of Paganini or Liszt for a one-night musical stand was about more than just music, or worse still, musical accuracy. Moving back in time, it is clear that in Mozart’s day musical cities such as Vienna and Prague boasted quite distinctive musical personalities. In earlier historical periods the question arises as to what can reasonably be defined as music (with or without notation). In recreating medieval song that is manifestly raw, dramatic and arresting, today’s singer might be forgiven for feeling shackled by concerns such as the replication of‘correct’ tempos, ‘effective’ dynamics and ‘appropri-ate’ textures, to say nothing of issues of pitch, temperament and pronuncia-tion. How, for instance, might latter-day performers recreate the medieval sound world of lone minstrels, choirs of monks, troupes of liturgical drama-tists, ensembles of early polyphonists or gatherings of enthusiastic scholars? Clearly, any investigation of any performances from before the age of record-ing will pose many more questions than can readily be answered.
This book is intended to stimulate intelligent thought about the role of performers and performance and shed new light on issues of performance history and practice. It includes contributions not only from scholars but also from accomplished performers, whose practical experiences have shaped their chapters and lent the volume a unique vitality and cogency. It aims to be wide-ranging but can never be exhaustive. Limitations of space have inevitably forced authors to be highly selective in their individual dissertations. Some have opted to use the microscope to address key issues relevant to their allotted topic/period, while others have considered a telescopic approach more appro-priate to their needs. This decision has been theirs, but thefinal responsibility for content and coverage is ours.
As afinal preliminary, some words of acknowledgement are in order. We should like to thank all our contributors, especially those who submitted their chapters on schedule, for their cooperation in discussing details of their mate-rial with us and with each other and making modifications as necessary. Many of them have shown enormous patience in waiting for the final pieces of a complex jigsaw to be put in place. We have also greatly valued the advice and encouragement of Andrew Parrott, who read some of the drafts and provided us with editorial guidance appropriate to some historical periods in which we questioned our own expertise. We are also grateful forfinancial support for the project from our respective institutions, the Royal College of Music and Cardiff University, some invaluable administrative support from Emma McCormack and Amy Blier-Carruthers (Royal College of Music) and, of course, the orderly input from our eagle-eyed copy-editor, Mary Worthington and proofreader, Sheila Sadler. Finally, thanks are due to Vicki Cooper, Commissioning Editor for the volume, and her team for their ideas and practical guidance throughout the project.
Colin Lawson Robin Stowell
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P A R T I
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P E R F O R M A N C E T H R O U G H
Performance today
N I C H O L A S K E N Y O NOnce upon a time, before Music television, before remote controls, before books on tape and Internet streaming media, a possible method of enjoying a basic art form was this: a person would sit down and listen to an entire symphony, for however long that took. It is not so easy anymore . . . Halfway through the adagio they feel a tickle somewhere between the temporal and occipital lobes and realise they arefighting an impulse to reach for a magazine . . . With all the arts making their small sacrifices to hurriedness, music lovers can hardly expect to be immune. There is a special kind of pain, though. Music is the art form most clearly about time.
James Gleick, Faster1
Please play
I am in the middle of the Roundhouse, North London. The only thing in the centre of the bare circular space, once used for reversing trains, is an old harmonium. On thefloor in front, it says PLEASE PLAY. It looks like a normal harmonium, except that out of the back of the instrument, an array of wires and leads stretches away, up and around the building. So I sit down. I press the keys, but instead of familiar sounds from the instrument, the whole circular building comes alive. Some keys produce metallic clanks on the pillars, some produce motor noises far away in the ceiling, some produce wheezing notes of indeterminate pitch . . . There is no skill required, no score of instructions: whatever you do is the performance. During the time I am there children, backpackers, a virtuoso with a self-timing camera to record the incident all try. The sounds are varied, random, striking. This is David Byrne’s Playing the Building.2
As I leave, I notice an advert for another event, Longplayer Live:‘Lasting 1000 years, Jem Finer’s Longplayer is the longest non-repeating piece of music ever
1 J. Gleick, Faster, New York, Random House, 1999, pp. 191–3. 2 See www.davidbyrne.com/art/art_projects/playing_the_building.
composed. For its live debut, a 1000 minute section will be performed by 25 musicians on a 20 metre wide instrument, made up of six concentric circles of Tibetan singing bowls. Alongside the unfolding music, there will be a 12-hour series of one-to-one conversations between 24 speakers.’3 In the
Daily Telegraph, art critic Richard Dorment writes about a Heiner Goebbels installation under the heading‘Who cares what it is, it’s terrific’: ‘Stifter’s Dinge is a performance with no performers and a concert with no musicians. As you take your seat in the windowless vault (once used to test concrete for the Channel Tunnel by dropping it from great heights), you are confronted with a formal sculptural arrangement consisting of five pianos and a few bare branches. On the floor below are three shallow rectangular pools and three fibreglass cubes. Of the five pianos, two are uprights, played in the traditional way by hammers hitting strings– except that the keys are struck by invisible fingers, like player pianos. The rest are played by robotic “arms” sliding either across or up and down the strings. Other sounds include shivers, shakes, rattles, scrapes, thumps and booms made– as far as I could figure out – with tin sheets, a tennis ball, concrete blocks, and blasts of air forced down a long drainpipe.’4
This is performance today. You feel that all bets are off, and no rules apply. However, in another great circular building in London, the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall are presenting a wealth of newly written work alongside the central classics of the repertoire, played by supremely accomplished exam-ples of that most traditional of Western cultural inventions, the symphony orchestra. So while the outer reaches of performance are explored, equally prominent is the regular recreation of the great achievements of Western music. The repertoire changes and expands constantly: in the 2010 Proms season, the music of Stephen Sondheim, whichfirst slipped into a Prom in a late-night concert in 1996, had a whole high-profile, televised evening of its own, as did the partnership of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It is not so long since Gershwin and Bernstein would have had a battle to make it into the Proms canon.5In the 2011 season, the net widens again to include Havergal Brian’s massive ‘Gothic’ Symphony, music by film composer Ennio Morricone, rock musician Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, and Hungarian folk music. The developments can be traced in a complete online database of Proms performances since 1895, which has taken some years to assemble and publish,6 whose bald but fascinating statistics conceal the traditional controversies
3 See Longplayer.org/live.
4 R. Dorment,‘Who cares what it is, it’s terrific’, Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2008.
5 BBC Proms Guide 2010, London, BBC Books, 2010; BBC Proms Guide 2011, London, BBC Books, 2011.
around the season’s repertoire, often fought out in the correspondence col-umns of the press: too little English music? Too much contemporary music? Too few central classics? What about women composers? Why so much jazz, and non-Western music? These debates expose the whole issue of the changing canon, the formulation of the repertoire that determines performance today.
Repertoire is also shifting fascinatingly in our opera houses. A Purcell semi-opera, The Fairy Queen, joined the Glyndebourne repertoire for thefirst time with huge success in 2009. Until quite recently Handel opera was unknown in our major houses, yet now it is a regular part of their seasons. In British opera houses, the core of great popular operas from Figaro to Bohème, Traviata to Rosenkavalier are now complemented by a huge range of ancient and modern pieces, from Monteverdi and Cavalli to Kurt Weill and Thomas Adès. The 2010–11 season at the Royal Opera House started not only with the staples of Così fan tutte and Don Pasquale, but also with the totally unknown Niobe, Regina de Tebe, by Agostino Steffani. At English National Opera, directors new to the art-form stimulate new perspectives about music drama: Terry Gilliam in Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, Mike Figgis in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia. The art-form, previously the preserve of the few, has in recent decades become increasingly available and professionalised as new companies have become established in Leeds, Wales and Scotland; many small-scale groups from the Classical Opera Company to Music Theatre Wales have established themselves. Each summer from June onwards,‘garden opera’ is a newly popular experi-ence, weather permitting, from the well-protected Grange Park Opera (in a distinctive theatre set within a dilapidated Hampshire mansion) to Garsington Opera (now in a temporary auditorium on a private estate near High Wycombe) and Opera Holland Park in London.
Meanwhile in churches and cathedrals, a variety of choral groups continue to provide the music for Sunday and other services, with a repertoire stretching all the way from Tye, Tallis, Byrd and Tomkins, to the church composers of today. The annual Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge, in many respects a perfect example of an invented tradition, has admirably commissioned a carol each year from composers including Arvo Pärt, Judith Weir, James Macmillan and Gabriel Jackson.7 In April 2011, millions watched a royal wedding in Westminster Abbey, whose traditional musical values were articulated through the dominance of the music of Hubert Parry, a commission from John Rutter and a work by Welsh composer Paul Mealor. Choral music from across the centuries continues to be heard in the
7 On Christmas Day: New Carols for King’s. King’s College Cambridge Choir/Stephen Cleobury. EMI 107243 5 5807021.
context of numerous liturgies, from Anglican Evensong or the Roman Catholic Mass to those services which celebrate the rich wealth of other devotions that have become part of our diverse country over recent decades. Pentecostalism and inspirational religious gatherings have brought new musics into worship; elsewhere it tends to be the predominately unchanging nature of religious celebration and its use of a musical repertoire from the distant past, leavened with new work, that maintains its function and its appeal. New generations of children will receive the specialised training offered by choir schools and cathedrals, and be drawn into a historical repertoire of music that has helped to define our culture over centuries. Specialist institutions such as the Purcell School and Chetham’s School of Music offer an increasingly broad educational and musical experience. The future of music in the curriculum of state schools, however, is currently under question and the subject of extensive review.8
How many young people of diverse backgrounds will continue to be drawn to music if it is not at the core of school activities throughout the country?
Still, in educational institutions from schools to conservatoires, aided by teachers, animateurs and creative leaders of many kinds, students gradually discover a repertoire through which they can develop their own personal skills of interpretation and understanding. They are developing skill and craft: as The New Grove sternly reminds us,‘the requirements of musical performance in Western culture are stringent’.9
Richard Sennett has recently suggested a reason why young people would undertake this laborious and difficult work: ‘the motivation is lodged in an experience fundamental to all human develop-ment: the primal event of separation can teach the young human to become curious’.10In learning and practising, they are discovering their own identities.
But the structures within which they learn, and the principles on which they are taught, are shifting rapidly.
This too, then, is performance today: it is based on a wealth of varying traditions which are rapidly being challenged by a multiplicity of new forms of listening, creation and reception. For not all of these performances depend onfidelity to a score, a skill acquired over years, and the active participation of a listening, concentrating audience. Many are much more open in their concep-tion, and much freer in their reception. They can be posted on the web without the mediation of agents, producers or record companies. Around the world, there are radically different situations in both performance and education, in
8 D. Henley, Music Education in England, London, Department for Education and the Department for Culture, Media, Olympics and Sport, 2011.
9 J. Dunsby, in S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 19, p. 348, art.‘Performance’.
America, in Africa, in the Far East, particularly in the emergingly powerful and influential musical world of China. That is beyond the scope of this chapter – such is the range of experience today that what is touched on here can only be a personal, partial picture. It attempts to provide a necessarily limited snapshot of current trends, from the perspective of the classical music scene, surveying its radically changing delivery and context. It glances into a world in which classical music takes its place among a huge range of musics, and no longer necessarily enjoys its habitual prominence or status.
The availability of everything
Tastes change all the time . . . You do your research, of course, but all musical performance is to do with feeling, and the ways of feeling music
tend to change through the generations.11
Sir Charles Mackerras 1925–2010 Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.12
T.S. Eliot
What is instantly available to us today is fascinating, disorientating and dis-turbing. You can click on YouTube to search for conductors andfind archive clips of Thomas Beecham, Henry Wood, Toscanini or Karajan, endless snip-pets of rare performances, a cornucopia of research possibilities. Enter ‘Furtwängler + Beethoven 9’ and you can find several newsreel versions of the dreadful sight of him conducting that symphony on 19 April 1942 with Nazi banners draping the stage; Beethoven’s utopian vision of brotherhood is followed by Goebbels approaching the stage to shake the conductor’s hand. (Does Furtwängler somehow move his handkerchief to clean his hand after-wards? Thefilm is not quite clear . . .) The images of wounded German soldiers, intently listening in the audience, have a strange resonance: they are not so different from those on the other side of the conflict. In Humphrey Jennings’s pioneering documentary Listen to Britain (also 1942), the famous National Gallery concerts in London are used to characterise the war, with empty picture frames as a reminder of the conflict, listened to by a British wounded soldier, with listeners placed by iconic pictures from the collection, as Myra Hess plays Mozart to the delight of Queen Elizabeth and Kenneth Clark.13
11 A. Clark,‘Open to interpretation’, Financial Times, 25 July 2009.
12 T. S. Eliot,‘Poetry in the eighteenth century’, in B. Ford (ed.), Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 4: From Dryden to Johnson, London, Penguin, 1957, p. 271. This seminal essay was written in 1930. 13 Included in the British Film Institute compilation Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930–50, BFI DVD 756.
To such uses has performance been put across the ages: to glorify power and to give hope to nations, to heighten the vanity of monarchs and prop up the power of potentates, to propagate a cultural view or to celebrate a dynastic marriage.14It has marked key moments in political change: when musicians
rushed to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein went so far as to rewrite the text of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the occasion, turning it into an Ode to Freedom.15The power of performance– in both its musical and iconographical aspects– is deployed on major occasions, such as the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, and the inauguration of the American President in Washington (both these occasions, ironically, having been shown to involve pre-recording and lip-synching, making their claims to be live performances at all somewhat dubious). Performance– its nature, purpose and reception – is a rich subject for debate and analysis. Yet this has not always been recognised by musicologists and music historians, focused as they have been on composers and their work.
In the twenty-first century, thanks to cheap and easily available technology, performance is more than ever totally democratic. Since the 1920s you have been able to listen to the radio broadcasts of music for absolutely nothing (in the UK, listening to the radio now does not even require the purchase of a TV licence); but what you listened to was selected– you heard what the BBC felt it right for you to listen to. Now, at a modest price, you can download any music you need onto your iPod, or listen to it online via Spotify. Some conventional means of dissemination, like radio, stillflourish, and since 1992 in the UK, Classic FM has offered a commercial classical music station within the context of an advertising-funded, pop-music format, offering a much more limited repertoire than BBC Radio 3, but attracting a wider audience. (This mirrors the relationship in the post-war years between highbrow culture on the BBC Third Programme, and light classics on the BBC Light Programme.) The BBC runs orchestras, invests in new commissions and promotes the Proms; that reflects its public service role. Classic FM helps live music by marketing and on-air promotion, but in the end is judged by making money for its owners’ share-holders. Both are now active in offering online services, streamed content, and (where permitted) downloads.16
14 See T. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture, Oxford University Press, 2002. 15 The powerful live recording with an international orchestra is available on CD. Deutsche Grammophon DG 429861–2.
16 The internationally successful Radio 3 free downloads of the nine Beethoven symphonies, offered to complement its complete on-air Beethoven survey, proved controversial with the record companies, and the BBC Trust prevented a repeat of this offer, though individual programmes including music can now be downloaded as podcasts.
Reissues of historic recordings are now a staple of the recording business, on labels such as BBC Legends and ICA Classics, and increasingly on video as well. Robert Philip has pointed out that as late as the 1970s, orchestral recordings of the past were‘virtually ignored’,17but now they are reissued with fervour and
greeted with fascination (they are certainly cheaper than originating new orchestral recordings in the studio). The whole century and more of recorded music is out there, somewhere.
But where? In this new world of availability and interactivity, do you know what music you want, and if not how do youfind out? If you do know, can you find what you need? This is not so easy, given the present chaotic nature of classical music cataloguing on downloading sites (an interesting example of how material can be endlessly available, but informed access is still limited).18 There is a previously unimaginable variety of music available to all, but the traditional routes by which a teacher, critic, commentator or broadcaster selected it and recommended it for you are challenged. You are more likely to be listening to what your friends recommend to you one night, or, trying a web link someone somewhere sends you, or randomly searching YouTube.
Serendipity and instant access rules. Is there too much dizzying choice in performance today?
Defining performance
When we recently moved out of our house, I was struck by the variety of musical elements in the front room. We had a harmonium, a piano, a cello, several recorders and a bassoon. Then there was a bookcase full of orchestral scores on one wall, and another wall full of books about composers, perform-ance and the history of music. There was a sound system, and piles of CDs. Instruments, scores, books, discs. What are they? Are they all ways of making music? Aids to performance? Help in listening to music? Which of them actually is‘music’?
The CDs certainly sound like music when you put them in the machine; you only need to know how to switch it on. The instruments make some sort of music if you know how to play them. The books explain music, or help you listen to it, if you can read. But the scores? Would anybody say, if casually asked
17 R. Philip,‘Historical recordings of orchestras’, in C. Lawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 203.
18 In an early encounter with iTunes, doubtless due to my own incompetence, I downloaded a complete performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni which played not in numerical track order, but in alphabetical track order, a truly bizarre experience.
in that room, that it is the scores that are music while the rest are not? (What you can do with a score on its own is extremely limited, unless you have the very specialised ability to read it and hear in your mind what it suggests.) Yet for generations musicologists have behaved as if scores were the only real thing about music. The original focus of musicology on the establishing of author-itative texts was derived from philology, and helped give the emerging disci-pline in the nineteenth century a positivist sense of scientific authority. The consequence has been that the text has comefirst: the lines of collected editions on library shelves have somehow acquired a primary status in discussions about music. A distinguished scholar wrote not so long ago of the‘notated essentials’ of music, to which is applied its‘performative clothing’.19But the vast majority
of us – the audience, and indeed performers – experience music exactly the other way round. The performance is the primary experience, while the notes, along with many other things, account for how it came to sound that way. The notes are indeed critical to determining how the music sounds, but it is surely the sound which‘is’ the music.
Some different key elements affecting performance can be highlighted by a few recordings of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.20 There is one which
actually changes Beethoven’s notes: Herbert von Karajan’s first recording of 1941 with the Berlin Staatskapelle,21where the horn parts in thefirst move-ment have been rewritten (it must be deliberate as they do it twice) to play in thirds the way people think horns play, instead of playing with the harmony. (So they play a written D in bar 90 instead of the written C.) No doubt this was some old edition or corrupt tradition which was subsequently corrected: I have never found an origin for this tradition. In contrast, one of Furtwängler’s recordings, recorded a decade later than Karajan’s, in 1953,22
changes Beethoven’s metronome marks – a much more common practice this, indeed at one time almost universal. The Trio of the Scherzo sounds the battle hymn of some distant republic at dotted minim equals 42 (as against Beethoven’s mark of 84). Toscanini, on the other hand, performed it at Beethoven’s speed as early as 1935 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.23There would be many who would argue that the metronome marks are not part of‘the piece’ at all, but just an aid to interpretation to be followed or ignored at will. In the second move-ment of the symphony there is an issue about the articulation at the end of the movement. This is the question of which notes are arco or pizzicato in the
19 N. Cook,‘Music as performance’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, New York and London, Routledge, 2003.
20 See my Royal Philharmonic Society lecture‘Tradition isn’t what it used to be’, 24 February 2001. 21 Berlin Staatskapelle/Herbert von Karajan, DG 423 526–2.
22 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Wilhelm Furtwängler, DG 427 401. 23 BBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini, BBC Legends BBCL4016–2.