The authors of this new work to join the extensive Cambridge History series rightly say that musical performance is attracting even more attention today than it has in the past. There are several reasons for this, ranging from the debate about “authentic and historical” performances of earlier works such as Mozart and Vivaldi, across to new ways in which digital and other technology can be used to “enhance fidelity” and showcase technical virtuosity. Add to that the musical and cultural changes happening to performance – ever wider global music and a plurality of styles, shifting preconceptions about taste and aesthetic, cross‐overs and the emergence of “happening” style performances such as Stockhausen, and all this makes now an appropriate moment to review and reassess musical performance. The work under review does a wide‐ranging and competent job, picking up on context, interpretation, vocal and instrumental issues, and historiography. At least two other titles in the Cambridge History series might be of interest to readers – one on Western music theory, and another on eighteenth‐century music.
This work will be a fine addition, then, to the bibliographic repertoire, and a suitable candidate for the shelves of an academic library (and that of any musical institution) where musical performance is being studied (and this is so more than ever, encompassing musical traditions and styles from classical to jazz and beyond). The volume is structured in a clear and logical way, making it easy for students to home in on specific periods (e.g. the seventeenth century) and aspects of musical performance within them (e.g. vocal or instrumental performance). Six of the eight sections of the book trace musical performance chronologically from the pre‐Renaissance period up through to 1600, then beyond to the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (regarding them loosely, because ultimately such intervals are arbitrary), and finally up through the later period to the present time. The editors suggest in their editorial that not only has interest in musical performance grown in recent years, but so has research and historiography (from scholarly to populist); not only have techniques and styles changed but so also has technology, the repertoire, the audience, notational and presentational approaches to musical texts, and the musical performance curriculum too.
For anyone familiar with musical performance as a field in its own right (and not merely with musicology or perhaps with their favourite musical genre or composers), it will come as no surprise at all that musicians have given much attention to performance – to interpretation, to improvisation (if one is Scarlatti), to historical authenticity (if one is Harnoncourt), to portamenti and vibrato and ornamentation (if one is a singer), to tuning and temperament (if one is a harpsichord player), to the balance of instruments in the symphony orchestra (if one is Berlioz or Brahms, and indeed one could have added Count Basie), and to the marriage of words and music (if one is involved with lieder). It is a self‐evident truth that musicians have discussed performance from the start, and there are many musical treatises to show it – on the keyboard, or polyphony, or the development and projection of the voice. The contributors to this Cambridge History note these guides and manuals (such as one by C.P.E. Bach on keyboard technique and another by Garcia on vocal practice), adding that musicians who were also teachers (such as Friedrich Wieck, Clara Schumann's father and father‐in‐law to Schumann himself, and in 1855 Wieck published his treatise on the klavier) and models (such as the opera singer Farinelli, acclaimed throughout Europe during the seventeenth century) were as influential.
The first section offers a framework – Nicholas Kenyon on performance today, William Weber describing the context in Europe to musical performance, Robin Stowell examining what evidence there is from recordings, annotated editions, treatises and the like, Corey Jamason reflecting on performers and composers, Natasha Loges and Colin Lawson discussing the teaching of performance (conservatoires to universities), and David Wright stepping back to analyse repertoire and taste and technology. Out of this grow the sections on the historical periods, each one consisting of four or five chapters, starting with one on context, each one covering vocal and instrumental performance, and concluding with a case study. The case studies are of particular interest because, well‐selected, they demonstrate how practical and research ideas and methods can and should be used – by musicians themselves and by anyone studying the works. So we have a Guillaume de Machaut ballade, the music of Seville Cathedral in the period 1549‐99, Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, a batch of Mozart's symphonies, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and characteristically Stockhausen's Gruppen für drei Orchester.
Elsewhere in and throughout the various essays, contributors provide information about the time and the music and the performers, as well as catching the historiographic flow that offers its own meta‐critical level to the discussion. The editors combine academic/research experience with musical administration and performance, Lawson (Director of the Royal College of Music in London, as a period clarinetist) and Stowell (Professor of Music and Director of the Centre for Research into Historically Informed Performance at Cardiff University, as a period violinist). Contributors include Stephen Cottrell, the ethno‐musicologist, Roger Heaton, the clarinetist and conductor, and Richard Wistreich, the expert on early singing. The focus is Western, mainly European, music (the work's chosen brief). Examples of musical material appear in some essays (e.g. showing polyphony or orchestration or vocal ornamentation).
A full bibliography (general and to individual periods) is provided and an index. In the concluding part, the two editors speculate on the future of musical performance: more globalization, more dominance of internet‐deliverable music, more fusions between instruments and computers, and yet always a creative tension between the demands and expectations of the audience on the one side, and the creative and interpretative energies of the performer on the other. Music might be wider now, but it is nevertheless still challenging to listen to well and perform well. It is good to have a reliable resource such as this.
