Performing Music History

Musicians Speak First-Hand about Music History and Performance

John C. Tibbetts, Michael Saffle, William A. Everett, John C. Tibbetts, Michael Saffle, William A. Everett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319924700
• eBook ISBN: 9783319924717
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music
• Index: Social Sciences

Performing Music History offers a unique perspective on music history and performance through a series of conversations with women and men intimately associated with music performance, history, and practice: the musicians themselves. Fifty-five celebrated artists—singers, pianists, violinists, cellists, flutists, horn players, oboists, composers, conductors, and jazz greats—provide interviews that encompass most of Western music history, from the Middle Ages to contemporary classical music, avant-garde innovations, and Broadway musicals.

The book covers music history through lenses that include "authentic" performance, original instrumentation, and social context. Moreover, the musicians interviewed all bring to bear upon their respective subjects three outstanding qualities: 1) their high esteem in the music world as immediately recognizable names among musicians and public alike; 2) their energy and devotion to scholarship and the recovery of endangered musical heritages; and 3) their considerable skills, media savvy, and showmanship as communicators. Introductory essays to each chapter provide brief synopses of historical eras and topics. Combining careful scholarship and lively conversation, Performing Music History explores historical contexts for a host of fascinating issues.

Further Reading

1. Antokoletz, Elliott, Victoria Fischer, and Benjamin Suchoff, eds. Bartók Perspectives: Man, Composer, and Ethnologist . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
2. Auner, Joseph. Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries . New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
3. Barzun, Jacques. Berlioz and the Romantic Century , 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
4. Benestad, Finn, and Dag Schjulderup-egge. Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist , trans. William H. Halverson and Leland B. Sateren. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
5. Blesh, Rudi, and Harriet Janis. They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American Music . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950.
6. Bowers, Jane, and Judith Tick, eds. Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950 . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
7. Bukofzer, Manfred F. Music in the Baroque Era . New York: W. W. Norton, 1947.
8. Burkholder, J. Peter, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music , 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.
9. Cooke, Mervyn. A History of Film Music . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
10. Daverio, John. Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
11. Dizikes, John. Opera in America: A Cultural History . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
12. Driggs, Frank, and Chuck Haddix. Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
13. Everett, William A., and Raul R. Laird, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Musical , 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
14. Fabbri, Paolo. Monteverdi , trans. Tim Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
15. Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: Minimal Music as Cultural Practice . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
16. Fischer, Jens Malte. Gustav Mahler . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
17. Gardiner, John Eliot. Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach , 4th ed. London, UK: Penguin, 2014.
18. Giddons, Gary. Visions of Jazz . New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
19. Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Medieval and Early Modern Music
• Late Baroque Music
• A Clutch of Instruments
• Classical and Early Romantic Music
• The Romantic Piano
• From Romanticism Toward Modernism
• The Art of the Accompanist
• Musical Multiplicities in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
• On Stage and Screen
• Engaging Audiences
• Back Matter