Some Misconceptions about the Baroque Violin

Much has been written about the baroque violin, yet many misconceptions remain most notably that up to around 1750 their necks were universally shorter and not angled back as they are today, that the string angle over the bridge was considerably flatter, and that strings were narrower gauge and under lower tension..

Eighteenth century techniques of classical improvisation on the violin: Pedagogy, practice and decline

The art of improvisation flourished in both instrumental and vocal music during the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries. The violin techniques of improvisation taught in the eighteenth century (such as ornamentation of melody, decoration of fermatas, extemporization of cadenzas and creation of preludes) formed an integral part of instrumental pedagogy and performance practice at the time, which then declined significantly from the early nineteenth century onwards. It seems that this practice of improvisation has been neglected and its principles almost forgotten in the world of classical Western music today. This paper makes an argument for the re-introduction of classical improvisation techniques into contemporary violin pedagogy. In order to do this, it firstly identifies what these techniques were, how they were taught, and how they were used at their peak, in the eighteenth century. Subsequently it accounts for the decline of improvisation at the turn of the nineteenth century, and justifies the importance and benefits of once again reviving this art-form

Vibrato in Eighteenth Century Orchestras

A rebuttal of Neumann, The vibrato controversy (see RILM 8965). The published writings of Galeazzi (1791-96), Geminiani (1751), Robert Bremner (1777), Carl Friedrich Cramer (1783), L. Mozart (1756), and the correspondence of W.A. Mozart (1778) maintain that vibrato was usually not employed by ripienists in 18th-c. orchestras, but only by soloists, and then used sparingly compared to modern practice

ヴァイオリン音楽における緩徐楽章の「恣意的装飾」 : 18世紀から19世紀初頭にかけての演奏習慣の「継承」と「断絶」

東京藝術大学平成29年

Performance Practice Bibliography 1990

A bibliography concerning works published in the field of historical performance practice in 1990

‘Petrarch's Sonnets’ by Liszt

The article ‘Petrarch’s Sonnets’ by Liszt revolves around the phenomenon of transformation, which dominated F. Liszt’s works. His impressive composing achievements made Liszt an unequalled author of all types of elaborations, paraphrases, adaptations, transcripts of both his own and other composer’s works, representing various styles and epochs. What is more, the transformation techniques employed by Liszt, different from the commonly applied evolutionary ones, coupled with extended tonality and harmony as well as new textures, resulted in an extremely broad scale of expression and subtly diverse expressive effects. Three of Petrarch’s Sonnets from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta collection are dedicated to Laura and represent this article’s major area of interest. The Hungarian composer worked on them three times: twice he composed them as songs and once as a piano triptych included in the Années de Pèlerinage. Dèuxieme Année: Italie series. His interpretation of the Sonnets, as well as the remaining works in the series, was inspired by the art of the old Italian masters married with the Romantic idea of correspondence des artes. While it is a part of artistic tradition to turn poetic works into songs (resulting in the vocal lyrics so typical of Romanticism), adding a musical dimension to a sonnet, a piece of poetry with a specific organisation of its content, a unique form and verse discipline, seems risky. It is extremely difficult to successfully transfer equivalent themes and structures onto a different medium i.e. piano music. By turning to Petrarch’s Sonnets, Liszt created congenial palimpsests, reflecting the syntactical and formal rudiments of the verse but, first and foremost, managing to portray Laura in new incarnations, subtly changing in the eternal search for the ideal of femininity, the so-called “Ewig-weibliche”. Especially in the piano version, Liszt seems to have accomplished the esoteric subtlety of the “Sprache über Sprache” available to and understood solely by poets and those in the know

‘Petrarch's Sonnets’ by Liszt

The article ‘Petrarch’s Sonnets’ by Liszt revolves around the phenomenon of transformation, which dominated F. Liszt’s works. His impressive composing achievements made Liszt an unequalled author of all types of elaborations, paraphrases, adaptations, transcripts of both his own and other composer’s works, representing various styles and epochs. What is more, the transformation techniques employed by Liszt, diff erent from the commonly applied evolutionary ones, coupled with extended tonality and harmony as well as new textures, resulted in an extremely broad scale of expression and subtly diverse expressive eff ects. Three of Petrarch’s Sonnets from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta collection are dedicated to Laura and represent this article’s major area of interest. The Hungarian composer worked on them three times: twice he composed them as songs and once as a piano triptych included in the Années de Pèlerinage. Dèuxieme Année: Italie series. His interpretation of the Sonnets, as well as the remaining works in the series, was inspired by the art of the old Italian masters married with the Romantic idea of correspondence des artes. While it is a part of artistic tradition to turn poetic works into songs (resulting in the vocal lyrics so typical of Romanticism), adding a musical dimension to a sonnet, a piece of poetry with a specifi c organisation of its content, a unique form and verse discipline, seems risky. It is extremely diffi cult to successfully transfer equivalent themes and structures onto a diff erent medium i.e. piano music. By turning to Petrarch’s Sonnets, Liszt created congenial palimpsests, refl ecting the syntactical and formal rudiments of the verse but, fi rst and foremost, managing to portray Laura in new incarnations, subtly changing in the eternal search for the ideal of femininity, the so-called “Ewig-weibliche”. Especially in the piano version, Liszt seems to have accomplished the esoteric subtlety of the “Sprache über Sprache” available to and understood solely by poets and those in the know

Performance Practice Bibliography 1990

A bibliography concerning works published in the field of historical performance practice in 1990