Dorottya Fabian

Renee Timmers

Emery Schubert

This book brings together researchers from a range of disciplines that use diverse methodologies to provide new perspectives and formulate answers to questions about the meaning, means, and contextualisation of expressive performance in music.

Empirical Approaches Across Styles and Cultures

Expressiveness in Music Performance

Analysing over 100 recordings from 1945-1975, this book examines twentieth-century baroque performance practice as evinced in all the commercially available recordings of J.S. Bach's Passions, Brandenburg Concertos and Goldberg Variations. Dorottya Fabian presents a qualitative, style-orientated history of the early music movement in its formative years through a comparison of the performance style heard in these recordings with the scholarly literature on Bach performance practice. Issues explored in the book include the availability of resources, balance, tempo, dynamics, ornamentation, rhythm and articulation. During the decades following the Second World War, the early music movement was more concerned with the revival of repertoire than with the revival of performance style which meant that its characteristics and achievements differed essentially from those of the later 1970s and 1980s. Period practice techniques were not practised even by ensembles using eighteenth-century instruments. Yet, as this survey reveals, several recordings of the period provide unexpectedly stylish interpretations using metre and pulse to punctuate the music. Such metric performance and appropriate articulation helped to clarify structure and texture and assisted in the creation of a musical discourse - the pre-eminent goal of baroque compositions.

A Comprehensive Review of Sound Recordings and Literature

Bach Performance Practice, 1945-1975

This book examines the nature of musical performance. In it, Dorottya Fabian explores the contributions and limitations of some of these approaches to performance, be they theoretical, cultural, historical, perceptual, or analytical. Through a detailed investigation of recent recordings of J. S. Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, she demonstrates that music performance functions as a complex dynamical system. Only by crossing disciplinary boundaries, therefore, can we put the aural experience into words. A Musicology of Performance provides a model for such a method by adopting Deleuzian concepts and various empirical and interdisciplinary procedures. Fabian provides a case study in the repertoire, while presenting new insights into the state of baroque performance practice at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through its wealth of audio examples, tables, and graphs, the book offers both a sensory and a scholarly account of musical performance. These interactive elements map the connections between historically informed and mainstream performance styles, considering them in relation to broader cultural trends, violin schools, and individual artistic trajectories. A Musicology of Performance is a must read for academics and post-graduate students and an essential reference point for the study of music performance, the early music movement, and Bach’s opus.

Dorottya Fabian

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