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Theoretical and Critical Contexts in Nineteenth-century Performance Practice

Arguably the most compelling change within musicology during the first decade of the twenty-first century has been the ‘performative turn’1 that brought to the fore the primacy of the meanings and insights that emerge from the study of the performative dimension of music. The ontological priority of the tangible musical score, which formed the bedrock of musicological research during the twentieth century, has recently been shaken by the coming to prominence of the ephemeral act of music-making – the musical performance. The move away from a text-based ideology and an overriding pre-occupation with the score ‘towards an understanding of music as performance’2 has been facilitated by recent digital technologies that allowed researchers to scrutinize in detail the century-old legacy of recorded performances, and thereby to validate recordings as primary musicological source materials. Taking into account actual performances and performance interpretations in reaching an understanding of ‘the music’, or regarding the differences between performances as relevant for the emergent meanings of a piece of music are no longer considered odd – and unsound – methodological choices. While explorations about older performance styles is not new (consider the history of the authentic performance movement going back to the work of Arnold Dolmetsch during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), it is only recently that it became possible to obtain rich data from recorded performances by professional musicians and thereby document with precision and in great detail how performance styles have changed since the beginning of audio recordings: the work carried at the AHRC-funded Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music – CHARM – has been instrumental in this respect3. Hypotheses regarding the reasons and causes of the changes in performance styles are now based on wide-ranging evidence gathered from recorded performances, and we are only beginning to grasp the complex