The past ten years have seen a rapidly growing interest in performing and recording Classical and Romantic music with period instruments; yet the relationship of composers' notation to performing practices during that period has received only sporadic attention from scholars, and many aspects of composers' intentions have remained uncertain. Brown here identifies areas in which musical notation conveyed rather different messages to the musicians for whom it was written than it does to modern performers, and seeks to look beyond the notation to understand how composers might have expected to hear their music realized in performance. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that, in many respects, the sound worlds in which Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms created their music were more radically different from ours than is generally assumed.

This volume brings together twenty-two of the most diverse and stimulating journal articles on classical and romantic performing practice, representing a rich vein of enquiry into epochs of music still very much at the forefront of current concert repertoire. In so doing, it provides a wide range of subject-based scholarship. It also reveals a fascinating window upon the historical performance debate of the last few decades in music where such matters still stimulate controversy.

Muziekhistorisch en musicologisch overzicht van de klassieke solozang vanaf de barok tot heden.

What are the key topics that define Romantic violin playing?

A 1999 overview of historical performance, surveying issues and suggesting future developments.

Hamilton dissects the oft invoked myth of a 'Great Tradition', or Golden Age of pianism. He then goes on to discuss the performance style great pianists, from Liszt to Paderewski, and delves into the far from inevitable development of the piano recital.

Research in the 20th and 21st centuries into historical performance practice has changed not just the way performers approach music of the 17th and 18th centuries but, eventually, the way audiences listen to it. This volume, beginning with a 1915 Saint-Sa? lecture on the performance of old music, sets out to capture musicological discussion that has actually changed the way Baroque music can sound. The articles deal with historical instruments, pitch, tuning, temperament, the nexus between technique and style, vibrato, the performance implications of musical scores, and some of the vexed questions relating to rhythmic alteration. It closes with a section on the musicological challenges to the ideology of the early music movement mounted (principally) in the 1990s. Leading writers on historical performance practice are represented. Recognizing that significant developments in historically-inspired performance have been led by instrument makers and performers, the volume also contains representative essays by key practitioners.