Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900 [Hardcover]

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.

Foreword,Sir Roger Norrington
Introduction
1. Accentuation in Theory
2. Accentuation in Practice
3. The Notation of Accents and Dynamics
4. Articulation
5. Articulation and Expression
6. The Notation of Articulation and Phrasing
7. String Bowing
8. Tempo
9. Alla Breve
10. Tempo Terms
11. Tempo Modification
12. Embellishment, Ornamentation, and Improvisation
13. Appoggiaturas, Trills, Turns, and Related Ornaments
14. Vibrato
15. Portamento
16. The fermata; Recitative; Arpeggiation; The Variable Dot and Other Aspects of Rhythmic Flexibility; Heavy and Light Performance
Index

This book will revolutionize the study of music...The book weaves strong patterns from the conflicting habits of different places, people and periods. It doesn't tell you exactly what to do, but inspires a confidence that your own decisions, thus informed, will work. --BBC Music Magazine

Brown has produced a work of the greatest scholarship and utility....Recommended--required!--for all libraries with music collections serving upper-division undergraduates and abolÃ