Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750-1900, and: The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction (review)

Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750-1900. By Clive Brown. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [xiii, 662 p. ISBN 0-19-816165-4. $110.]

The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction. By Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell. (Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. [xiii, 219 p. ISBN 0-521-62193-3 (cloth); 0-521-62738-9 (pbk.). $54.95 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]

In 1999, a relatively hushed period in the scholarly discourse on performance practice came to an end. Two new books on the subject appeared, both dealing with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but with rather different aims and somewhat divergent approaches. These two volumes show the extent to which thinking has changed and research has proceeded in this field since the lively debates of the eighties; they also show the tenacity of certain cherished ideologies linked to historically informed performance ("HIP"). In uncovering many areas for future research while leaving others enticingly undiscussed, Clive Brown, Colin Lawson, and Robin Stowell call for others to join the conversation.

The authors turn to their subjects in a spirit of careful, cautious investigation. Their approach is perhaps due in part to the decidedly moralistic tone of past debates over HIP. They emphasize the process of inquiry into performance practices rather than engaging in a discussion of philosophy and aesthetics. Brown's study of selected issues for the period 1750-1900 centers on notation and what it might reveal of composers' "intentions, expectations, or tacit assumptions" (p. 1) regarding the performance of their works. His substantial book, which presents many new findings and demonstrates new approaches, is aimed at scholars and performers (string players in particular) with a thirst for detailed discussion of both theory and practice, especially concerning accentuation and articulation. Lawson and Stowell's book, dealing with the period 1700-1900, is at once broader in scope and less detailed, as befits a concise inaugural volume to the series Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music. These authors are more concerned with summarizing past scholarship than with presenting new research. Their goal is to provide students and performers with "an historical basis for artistic decision-making which has as its goal the re-creation of performances as close as possible to the composer's original conception" (p. xii). To this end, they give an overview of the historiography of HIP, an outline of source-study procedures, and introductions to both small- and large-scale performance-practice issues, from accentual inflections to room acoustics.

Lawson and Stowell provide many insights into period instrumental technique, particularly wind and string practices. Their discussion is intended as an introduction to the more detailed treatment found in the volumes for individual instruments that follow in the Cambridge series. Brown, too, has contributed greatly to our understanding of period technique, especially for string instruments. Yet both volumes would have benefited from a more nuanced treatment of this topic. For example, the authors omit discussion of the contrasting performative ideals developed by pianists in England and those in Germany and Austria in the late eighteenth century. Although Brown cites Johann Peter Milchmeyer (Die wahre Art das Pianoforte zu spielen, 1797), who has traditionally been thought of as the first to describe legato as the basic keyboard touch (p. 172), Bart van Oort ("Haydn and the English Classical Piano Style," Early Music 28 [2000]: 78-79) has pointed out that the finger technique Milchmeyer describes, in conjunction with the Viennese instruments he was writing about, would not have produced a perfect legato. While the basic touch in Vienna remained non-legato until well after 1800, in England, Muzio Clementi's Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Pianoforte (1801) was the first to describe legato as normative.

Brown repeatedly emphasizes the necessity of dealing with performance-practice issues for this period on a case-by...