Baroque Music

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-Saëns 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.

Peter Walls is Emeritus Professor of Music at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of Music in the English Courtly Masque (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1996), History, Imagination and the Performance of Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003) and numerous articles on historical performance practice. A baroque violinist and conductor, he is currently Chief Executive of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.