Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900

Clive Brown

From the Foreword by Sir Roger Norrington: "This is the book we have been waiting for. ...Music-making must always involve guesses and inspirations, creative hunches and improvised strategies, above all, instinct and imagination. But if we don't have all the answers, the least we can do is to set out on our journey with the right questions. These questions and indeed many of the possible answers, Clive Brown gives in wonderful profusion. I cannot recommend this book too highly."

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.

Contents

• 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