Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music. Edited by Scott McCarrey, Leslie A. Wright

These essays offer a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and performers who see performance as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. Each contributor considers examples drawn from a particular repertoire or composer. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks.

Scott McCarrey is Professor of Piano at Brigham Young University-Hawai’i. His doctorate at York University, UK, was focused on the performance and analysis of Ravel, an interest which led him to co-organize, along with Lesley A. Wright and Roy Howat, the 2007 conference entitled ’French Music: Performance and Analysis’. Lesley A. Wright is a Professor of Musicology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Throughout her career she has focused on Bizet, Massenet and their contemporaries, French opera, the Parisian press, and the institutions that supported the careers of French musicians.