baroque music essay
Walls, Peter, ed. Baroque Music, The Library of Essays on
Music Performance Practice, series editor Mary Cyr.
Farnham, Surry, UK, and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate,
2011. ISBN 978-0-7546-2882-8.
David Schulenberg
Copyright 2012 © Claremont Graduate University
In the sciences, there are foundational articles on which entire disciplines are founded. Physicists today rarely read the papers in which Einstein demonstrated the principles of the theory of relativity, but thousands of papers based on them have been published during the past hundred years, and the results are enshrined in textbooks. The original papers remain of interest as historical documents and as models of style and reasoning.
Such cannot be said for most of the papers gathered together in this contribution by Peter Walls to a series called, not without pretension, “The Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice.” Titles in the series are limited to the style-periods of the Western European art-music tradition, implying that the only practices worth studying are those that were employed in the past for “classical” repertories of interest to present-day academics and recording companies. I happen to share those interests, as do probably most readers of this journal—but the point of view conveyed by the title is surprisingly oldfashioned.
So too is the idea that current students and practitioners are well served by a heavy volume of previously published articles, many of them resized to be smaller than the originals. The price ($300.00) is equally hefty, startlingly so given that some of the illustrations are reproduced too indistinctly to be fully legible. Two thirds of the thirty items reprinted here are readily available online, many of them more readable (and searchable) in electronic format. A few items have been reset, and there is limited new matter—an editor's introduction, and author's “postscripts” attached to a handful of items— although these show signs of poor
Music Performance Practice, series editor Mary Cyr.
Farnham, Surry, UK, and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate,
2011. ISBN 978-0-7546-2882-8.
David Schulenberg
Copyright 2012 © Claremont Graduate University
In the sciences, there are foundational articles on which entire disciplines are founded. Physicists today rarely read the papers in which Einstein demonstrated the principles of the theory of relativity, but thousands of papers based on them have been published during the past hundred years, and the results are enshrined in textbooks. The original papers remain of interest as historical documents and as models of style and reasoning.
Such cannot be said for most of the papers gathered together in this contribution by Peter Walls to a series called, not without pretension, “The Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice.” Titles in the series are limited to the style-periods of the Western European art-music tradition, implying that the only practices worth studying are those that were employed in the past for “classical” repertories of interest to present-day academics and recording companies. I happen to share those interests, as do probably most readers of this journal—but the point of view conveyed by the title is surprisingly oldfashioned.
So too is the idea that current students and practitioners are well served by a heavy volume of previously published articles, many of them resized to be smaller than the originals. The price ($300.00) is equally hefty, startlingly so given that some of the illustrations are reproduced too indistinctly to be fully legible. Two thirds of the thirty items reprinted here are readily available online, many of them more readable (and searchable) in electronic format. A few items have been reset, and there is limited new matter—an editor's introduction, and author's “postscripts” attached to a handful of items— although these show signs of poor