Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice , Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), xii + 1061 pp.
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: Clive Brown's Classical and Romantic Performance Practice, 1750-1900 first appeared in 1999 and quickly became a standard reference work for historical performance studies, cited and used by musicologists and performers alike.The book established itself as a cornerstone: a foundational reference text whose empirical precision anchored the still-forming field of nineteenth-century performance-practice research.Over the past decades conductors from Roger Norrington to Kent Nagano and performer/researchers from Neal Peres da Costa to David Milsom and Kate Bennet Wadsworth have expanded upon and put into practice the book's findings.1 Drawing on a mountain of written evidence -treatises, reviews, correspondence, manuscripts and early editions of scores -Brown offered an unprecedented synthesis of how performers from the time of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) through Antonin Dvořák (1873-1904) might have approached the expressive and technical parameters of the musical repertoire in performance.A quarter-century later, Brown's mammoth second edition (2025) represents not a simple revision but an act of renewal and recontextualization.The field that the first edition helped to define has evolved considerably.In the intervening years, attention to early recordings, performer individuality, and the social embeddedness of musical practice has reframed what it means to study 'performance practice'.While Brown's empirical approach remains deeply rooted in documentary evidence, his engagement with early sound recordings and his more flexible understanding of notational prescription signal an awareness of this shifting landscape.The new edition opens with an assertion that could serve as its methodological manifesto.The purpose of the book, Brown tells us, is: to help us understand the intentions, expectations, or tacit assumptions of late-18th and 19th-century composers, to investigate the extent to which these intentions, expectations and assumptions may be implied or specified by their notation, and, above all, to identify some of the constantly changing conventions of performance that informed the experience and practice of composers and executants alike (p. 2, second edition).
Source: Nineteenth-Century Music Review
Author: Emlyn Stam
Institution: Fontys University of Applied Sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7119503075
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