Historical performance

Grounded in a tradition of stylistically disparate genres of music-making, the period’s songs are often generalized in terms of ‘fad’,  spuriously dismissed as predominantly English-language hapahaole (‘’half- white”), pandering to then-emerging trends.  This paper explores the first recordings of local vocal ensembles made in Hawaii; the convergence of preserved traits drawn from various discernible styles beckons closer scrutiny. Using comparative methodology to trace outside stylistic influences, we can identify these traits as unique features of both truly polyphonic and heterophonic singing present in several specifically chosen examples, and ultimately, determine what (besides the language of the texts), binds them together as uniquely Hawaiian. Therefore, an approach to these pieces based on, or illustrating, the very act of recording as spontaneous performance may provide an essential platform for further analysis and study, a rare opportunity of stepping back in time towards better understanding them in terms of influence’ and cultural identity.

In the 18th century, the violoncello usurped the viol as the preferred solo bass instrument throughout Europe, but the lack of skilled cellists in the British Isles along with a preference for the Italian style resulted in high demand for Italian cellists and composers. Mainland musicians flocked to London, influencing the resident musical style and solidifying the violoncello’s place in the developing musical ensembles.

To further understand this crucial period in the history of the violoncello, this paper investigates the rationale for the violoncello’s triumph over the viol, the factors driving Italians to the Isles, the influence of Frederick, Prince of Wales as an important patron and cellist himself, and the interaction between the British and Italian compositional styles. As quantitative evidence, tables detailing the specific Italian composers found in the Isles, the pieces commissioned by Frederick, and the treatises published at the time have been compiled. This research aims to illuminate the impact of the Italian influence on the violoncello and its repertoire in the special circumstances that the Isles presented.

Explores the contentious position of improvisation in the contemporary Baroque music revival. Paradoxically, historical performers aim to obey the composer’s intentions by paying careful attention to the written instructions of the musical score yet they also seek to recreate the performative conventions and freedoms of an earlier era. The performance practice literature, the recording industry, and the conservatory education of historical performers reinforce a text-centered approach to music that is antithetical to spontaneous creativity. While in-depth understanding of Baroque performing conventions and repertoire is important, greater rapprochement with living improvisatory traditions might result in more liberatory performances of early music.

‘Theatre’ and ‘playhouse’ are two words often used interchangeably nowadays. In the early modern period, however, each word was known to be different in meaning, intent, and reach. While ‘theatre’ signified a classical space with a visual focus (it had its origins in the Greek verb θεᾶσθαι, ‘to see’), ‘playhouse’ signified a locus of all-purpose entertainment (it can be roughly translated ‘storeplace of fun’). This chapter consequently has two parts: ‘theatre’ and ‘playhouse’. It first considers the elevated, classical, and highly visual credentials of ‘theatre’, asking how that word is used in early modern drama and why the spectators might also be known, collectively, as a ‘theatre’. It then investigates ‘house’+‘play’, exploring how many internal ‘houses’ – tiring house, domestic house, music house, tap house, and house of office – made up the single playhouse space; and asking why the audience there was – and still is – known as ‘the house’. It turns finally to the way ‘play’ stands for a variety of onstage ‘fun’ – swordfights, puppet shows, acrobatic displays, wit-battles – as well as offstage sales of food, drink, books, and ballads, in addition to text. Given that neither ‘theatre’ nor ‘playhouse’ are words that focus on staged ‘drama’, its question, throughout, is what they reveal about the priorities of early modern performance spaces.

Currently there is a strong notice of standardization in the field of Early Music and less artistic diversity in comparison to the early days of its revival. The question is whether institutions that took the training of specialized musicians into their curriculum are debt to this tendency, or that we have in general reached a point of saturation implementing historical evidence as a creative parameter. Certainly in the last decades steady technical improvements of instruments and the level of playing have been leading to the origin of a new main stream.
In this paper I propose that by following explicit historical knowledge as instructions and rules for performance we create an inclination towards an increasingly redundant output. Even the recent interest for methods of learning to improvise in a historical way seems to be inspired more by a desire to mirror the old masters than to create freedom in performance.
The way to challenge this attitude is to dig deeper in the creative momentum.
If we follow the history of the Early Music movement backwards, we see that virtually all initiatives for revival and revaluation of music from the past were taken by composers or musicians in close relation with composers. Subsequently the hang ups of performers which tend to be dominating education today, did not have this priority in the very beginning. The experiment, search for the unheard, imaginative explorations or other creative endeavours are characteristics of the input which composers contributed to the quest of Early Music. Fundamentally different however, from the ethnic implantations, folkloristic or popular crossovers which we find in the entertaining  arrangements of today’s creators.
It could be an enlightening process to re-examine the rules we tacitly tend to be playing by in a dialogue with living composers and thus discover the space for personal creativity.

Professional musicians and connoisseurs have frequently questioned the performance authenticity of piano roll renditions. Do they give a fair representation of the artist’s expressive intention, or were so-called hand-played reproducing piano roll performances so constrained by technological limitations that in order to produce salable product, the artist’s live rendition needed to be significantly modified? Artis Wodehouse seeks to open a discussion of these questions through a new analytic method.

In the 1960s, Gustav Leonhardt transformed from locally successful Dutch harpsichordist into a global phenomenon.  Ironically Leonhardt, an advocate for historical performance and building preservation, achieved critical and commercial success during an era marked by rhetoric of social protest, renewal, and technological progress. 
An analysis of Leonhardt’s American reception reveals paradoxes of taste, aesthetics and political engagement.  Record company advertisements, interviews and other materials promoted Leonhardt not only as a virtuoso performer-conductor, but also as a serious and scholarly persona. Leonhardt’s recordings demonstrate an “authenticist” stance, contrasting with the Romantic subjectivity of earlier Bach interpreters and the flamboyant showmanship of competing harpsichordists.  Complementing this positioning were Leonhardt’s austere performances in Straub-Huillet’s film Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, his advocacy for historical instruments, and his uncompromising repertoire choices.  Associations with the Fulbright program and prestigious American universities further strengthened his reputation as a scholar-performer.
To a conservative older generation, Leonhardt represented sobriety and a link to the past.  Nonetheless, Leonhardt’s staid persona had broader appeal:  an unlikely ‘guru,’ he attracted flocks of devotees.  Younger musicians, inspired by Leonhardt’s speech-like harpsichord articulation and use of reduced performing forces, viewed his performances as anti-mainstream protest music—despite Leonhardt’s own self-consciously apolitical stance.  Moreover, the antiquity of the harpsichord and historical instruments complemented concurrent interests in craftsmanship, whole foods and authenticity; yet early music’s popularity was dependent upon technological mediation, especially high fidelity recordings.  Leonhardt thus emerges as a complex figure whose appeal transcended generational boundaries and bridged technological mediums.

The Notenkrakersactie of 17 November 1969 was a landmark event for Dutch musical life: a group of composers disrupted a concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, protesting against the orchestra’s lack of contemporary music programming. Scholars have tended to interpret this protest as a watershed for the avant-garde, but historical performance – not just contemporary music – proved to be a significant beneficiary. Early Musicians, like New Musicians, had common political goals and appealed to the youth counterculture. Ensuing reforms to the federal arts subsidy system, state-funded music schools, and conservatories in the 1970s were also advantageous for the Dutch Early Music movement. During the welfare retrenchment of the 1980s and the subsidy restructuring of the 1990s, Early Music ensembles economized and had greater success with mainstream recording companies and audiences than new music groups. Nearly forty years after the Notenkrakersactie, traditional symphony orchestras have...

Antonín Dvořák composed his last opera after 15 months of searching a new operatic topic. He decided for Jaroslav Vrchlický's libretto Armida from 1888, wchich was written after T. Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. The genesis of the opera consist of a few compositional phases (first sketches, consistent sketch, full score). On stage wasn't Armida successful. It's first performance in 1904 was embarrassed and for the next performance at the stage of National Theatre in Prague Armida had to wait till 1928. Editional history of the opera includes only the vocal score (1941, 1951), full score still waits for its publication.

Discusses the 1968 film, Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, in which the harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt performs the role of J.S. Bach. What the film reveals about Bach performance practice in 1968 is explored.

Resumen: El propósito principal de este artículo es proporcionar una breve biografía a respecto de Marin Marais (1656-1728), en portugués. Las informaciones recompiladas no son inéditas y se basóen artículos y libros disponibles. La principal contribución de este artículo fue encontrar y verificar la cita de las fuentes primarias que a menudo no se mencionan o citan de manera incorrecta. Abstract: The main purpose of this article is to provide a short biography about Marin Marais in Portuguese. The information gathered is not unpublished and was based on articles and books available. The main contribution of this article was to find and verify the citation of primary sources that are often not mentioned or cited in the wrong way. Palabras-clave: Viola de la Gamba-Musica barroca francesa-Musica Antigua-Interpretación Històricamente Informada.

Abordando una perspectiva teórica proveniente de la disciplina teatrológica, el escrito tiene por objetivo realizar un análisis de la performance Zona de dolor 1 o "Maipú" de Diamela Eltit de 1980. Para ello me detengo en la piel, el cuerpo, la voz y el dolor como superficies de una experiencia sensible generadora de conocimiento que se perciben del visionado del video disponible de la performance. El análisis de la performance requiere de un rescate historiográfico en el que se discuta la parcialidad con que el concepto de "escena de avanzada" (Richard) interpretó Zonas de dolor (1980 y 1982), situando una lectura de las filiaciones y entrecruzamientos de Eltit con Ronald Kay y el seminario que le dedicó a la sabiduría de Antonin Artaud el año 1974. El pensamiento en torno al cuerpo, la carne y el dolor del teatrista francés acompaña las siguientes reflexiones y permiten presentar el poder de lo performativo en la voz de Diamela Eltit en algunas escenas del video de Zonas de dolor 1.

This chapter is about the homage routinely paid to Shakespeare by dramatists and performers, and their ignorance of his actual works. It shows that Shakespeare’s plays were known best in their adapted Restoration forms; they were then further altered; and it was already-altered seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Shakespeare plays that provided characters, plot moments, and ‘beauties’ to be threaded through subsequent adaptations and, occasionally, imitations. Much of Shakespeare’s popularity, indeed, rested on the extent to which he had already been altered and was thus available for further alteration – his texts were seen as fundamentally unfixed and so free for remoulding and reshaping. Shakespeare was, then, assimilated through the process of adapting his adaptations: his staged works were always current, and that was because they were always substantially eighteenth-century. Though Shakespeare’s characterisation and storylines were regularly extracted for ‘popular’ theatre and puppet entertainments, his plays as a whole were relegated; only particular word-conscious ‘literary’ productions staged Shakespeare's plays in full at all. Even then, however, the playwright’s language and sentiments were updated to fit eighteenth-century mores and his stories were reduced to leave room for exciting new eighteenth-century entertainments. As all Shakespeare was adapted Shakespeare, a habit built up of staging a fictional version of Shakespeare the man to sanction the alterations of his plays. From this it was only a small step before the ‘Shakespeare’ character started to thrive in his own right on the eighteenth-century stage: extending beyond plays actually by the bard, ‘Shakespeare’ began authorizing other plays by other people. Thus both Shakespeare’s works, and ‘Shakespeare’ represent the way the eighteenth-century was able to tame and regularise its past and shape it to the present; what affected eighteenth-century dramatists was not actual Shakespeare but the works and person that they were able to make him be.

The recordings of pianists born before 1900 offer tantalizing evidence of nineteenth-century performance practice.  However, the unfamiliar environment of the early recording studio and technical restrictions of the the recording process caused many artists to adopt interpretive compromises from their normal approach to their live performance.  This bibliography focuses on the relationship between the live performances of pianists born before 1900 and their recordings on cylinder and disc.

index.html ***Reprinted with permission. No further reproduction is authorized without written permission from the University of California, Santa Barbara. This version of the document is not the version of record. Figures and/or pictures may be missing from this format of the document.*** Article: In February 1968, a fateful year perhaps better remembered for its political upheavals, student uprisings, assassinations and the escalation of the Vietnam War than its cinematic achievements, a curiously backward-looking film premiered at the 1968 Cinemanifestatie Festival in Utrecht.1[1] The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, reconstructs the life of Johann Sebastian Bach through an examination of his music and documents, and stars the Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt as the composer.2[2] The film, which consists mainly of musical performances of Bach's music, is narrated from the perspective of his second wife, portrayed by Christiane Lang-Drewanz, who recounts the activities of their day-today life in Cöthen and Leipzig.3[3] How could an austere film about Bach's life and music, set in a remote eighteenth-century sound-and landscape, have been produced in the midst of the ferment and discontent of the late 1960s? Not surprisingly, Chronicle did not receive widespread distribution, though it fared respectably for an independently-produced film. Following its premiere, it was viewed at a number of other prestigious European events, including Critics Week at Cannes and festivals in Berlin, Venice, London, and New York, and was awarded several prizes.4[4] Still, Chronicle never found a wide audience. Neither a biopic nor a documentary, the film's generic transgressions stymied critics. Straub-Huillet5[5] employ many documentary-like techniques, such as extended shots during which the camera lingers on musical scores, letters and other manuscripts from Bach's life. Such static camera movement, together with the preponderance of live musical performances and the lack of character development, make for a slow-moving plot. Moreover, few scenes are fully acted out, meaning that Chronicle does not follow the typical Hollywood conventions of the musical biopic, which tend to be romanticized, dramatic interpretations of the composer's life, emphasizing the tragic aspects.6[6] In its resistance to such models, Chronicle exemplifies what Robert Rosenstone has termed an-innovative or experimental‖ biopic, which-presents a life in the form of a fragmented or a chronological drama rather than a traditional linear story.‖7[7] This lack of a conventional narrative structure meant that many disenchanted reviewers for the mainstream press in Germany and the U.S. found the film-deadly dull.‖8[8] Penelope Gilliatt of the New Yorker quipped,-Sometimes I watched the moments when the pretend Bach changed manuals on the harpsichord, and sometimes I fell into things that never get into reviews, like thoughts of dinner, and what to do with your life, and how bitterly cold the airconditioning can be in America.‖9[9] Following the premiere, a Dutch critic for the Volkskrant, a left-leaning daily, posted a similarly snarky headline:-A soundtrack of Bach does not a film make.‖10[10] It was not only Chronicle's slow pace that made it lack commercial appeal. Chronicle is also a film oddly out of sync with its own time, in terms of its use of technology, its setting and its topic. It is low-budget and low-tech: the directors employ black and white film and period costumes while eschewing special effects and even stereophonic sound.11[11] Moreover, with Bach as its rarefied subject, an iconic figure of classical-high art‖ music, Chronicle seems both disengaged from the pressing social issues of the 1960s and from the musical tastes of that decade's youth culture. This distance from more worldly contemporary concerns was not lost on the avant-garde French director Jean-Luc Godard, who, despite providing financial backing for Chronicle, nevertheless complained about the film's lack of-relevance to contemporary problems.‖12[12] Certainly Godard's own work is far more explicitly ideological; his controversial films and his outspoken leftist political views would make him a cult hero of the May 1968 movement in Paris.13[13] Indeed, it is striking to contemplate that two of Godard's most politically-engaged films were shown alongside Chronicle in the 1968 festival circuit.14[14] That Godard's films continue to resonate in the collective memories of ‗68ers is indicated by their prominent position on the programs of major 1968 film retrospectives held during the recent fortieth anniversary year, including those of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Film Forum in New York, and Cinema '68 in London. Chronicle, however, was conspicuously absent.15[15] Chronicle has occasionally been revived at German avant-garde cinema exhibitions and Bach festivals, and if it remains relatively obscure to the general public, it is known to film studies scholars and Bach aficionados.16[16] The austerity of Straub-Huillet's aesthetic, their economy of means and camera movement, and their artistic singlemindedness have won these directors praise as-filmmaker's filmmakers.‖17[17] As such, Chronicle has proven to be a rich text for analysis, particularly from the perspectives of literary and film theory. Maureen Turim, who conducted a frame-by-frame study of the film, argues that Straub and Huillet manipulate classic cinematic codes in Chronicle to construct an alternative narrative, which she associates with minimalism (after Roland Barthes) or-écriture blanche‖ (after Christian Metz).18[18] Other scholars have analyzed the film's connection to-counter-cinema,‖ Brechtianism and Marxist ideology.19[19] Still, while Chronicle receives a passing mention in recent studies of film music, music scholars have for the most part paid it little attention.20[20] Indeed, the composer biopic is a frequently-maligned genre among musicologists, who tend to be suspicious of such films for their historical inaccuracies, their Romanticized accounts of musicians' lives, and their facile mapping of biographical events to musical ones.21[21] Yet Chronicle cannot so easily be discounted on these

As part of Senate House Library's "Queer Between the Covers" exhibition, this post sheds light on the key elements of Oscar Wilde's "Salome" that have ensured its popularity as well as its place within the canon of camp and queer literature/performance (and art).

The Notenkrakersactie of 17 November 1969 was a landmark event for Dutch musical life: a group of composers disrupted a concert of the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, protesting against the orchestra's lack of contemporary music programming. Scholars have tended to interpret this protest as a watershed for the avant-garde, but historical performance—not just contemporary music—proved to be a significant beneficiary. Early musicians, like new musicians, had common political goals and appealed to the youth counterculture. Ensuing reforms to the federal arts subsidy system, state-funded music schools, and conservatories in the 1970s were also advantageous for the Dutch early music movement. During the welfare retrenchment of the 1980s and the subsidy restructuring of the 1990s, early music ensembles economized and had greater success with mainstream recording companies and audiences than new music groups. Nearly 40 years after the Notenkrakersactie, traditional symphony orchestras have less influence on Dutch musical life, but recent cutbacks to arts subsidies threaten contemporary music and historical performance alike