Baroque Music Today: Music As Speech : Ways to a New Understanding of Music
Baroque Music Today: Music As Speech : Ways to a New Understanding of Music
Publisher: Amadeus Pr | pages: 210 | 1995 | ISBN: 0931340918 | CHM | 12,1 mb
Publisher: Amadeus Pr | pages: 210 | 1995 | ISBN: 0931340918 | CHM | 12,1 mb
Love him or hate him, call him a pioneering genius or dusty and mannered, Nikolaus Harnoncourt deserves a lot of credit. Not only did he lead the period-instrument movement into its first major successes (both artistic and commercial) but his ideas about how to play Baroque- and Classical-era music (and why to play it that way) have had enormous influence even on conventional symphony orchestras and their conductors. This volume is a collection of essays and lectures Harnoncourt has given over the years laying out those very ideas. The title, Baroque Music Today, is something of a misnomer at this point: the latest essay in the book dates from 1980, and the second essay, "The Interpretation of Historical Music," is effectively the founding mission statement (from 1954) of Harnoncourt's period-instrument orchestra, the Concentus Musicus of Vienna. While the occasional observation seems dated or debatable, and certain points are repeated from chapter to chapter (the chapters were originally separate lectures), most of what Harnoncourt has to say remains both instructive and persuasive.