Historically Informed Performance: Theory and Practice of the 18th-Century Musical and Theatrical Repertoire

Salzburg) posed a series of fundamental questions about the 'how' and 'why' of early music today.His iconoclastic vision was both panoramic and down-to-earth, positioning the early-music performer between the worlds of intellect and intuition, academia and artistry: two 'different spiritual moments' with 'different ontologies'.Ghielmi pleaded for a view of the past that keeps open the door between musicological study and the embodiment represented by performance.His subsequent paper, 'The Secret of Monsieur Marais: The Distance between the Sign and the Art of Music', worked through some of the implications of the keynote address.He concluded by asking how it might be possible to recover the secrets of European performing traditions that are absent from the sources: traditions that were handed down from master to pupil and not written down before the late eighteenth century.These secrets would be well placed to help us navigate today's many questions about early-music performance.Ghielmi also delighted conference delegates with an exquisite performance on unaccompanied viola da gamba, entitled 'Voix humaines: A arte de falar com a viola da gamba' (Human Voices: The Art of Speaking with the Viola da Gamba), with music by Marais, Hume, Forqueray, Abel and Ghielmi himself.Several papers explored what Ills Szabolcs (Zenetudomnyi Intzet, Blcsszettudomnyi Kutatkzpont) termed 'research on the soundscapes of the past'.Szabolcs analysed styles of performing early music from the 1950s onwards, suggesting that most ensembles could be described as either aiming for 'reliable baroque performance based on historical research' or introducing 'modifications according to the expectations of modern concert life'.He appealed for a return to the experimental spirit of the initial phases of the early-music movement.Llus Heras (Conservatori de Terrassa) spoke on the use of the tenor violin in Spanish music from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.In a technically detailed paper he explored the etymology of the word 'violn', indicating exactly when and where the instrument was used.A series of iconographical examples from a database of Iberian artworks showed the organological diversity of stringed instruments of the time, and Heras concluded that the tenor violin 'had a place of its own, albeit a lesser one' in Spanish music in the period under consideration.