“PERFORMANCE PRACTICE”

Chapter:

CHAPTER 4 Class and Classicism

Source:

MUSIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

It is no easy task nowadays, even for a historian, to demote the composer from the top of the musical hierarchy or to acknowledge the fluidity of opera seria texts at the hands of the singers, not to mention the crucial importance of unwritten music to the genre. In an essay of 1957 devoted (with opera seria uppermost in mind) to the variable aspects of performance practice and the relatively weak integrity of musical texts during this period, Donald Jay Grout argued strongly, and against longstanding prejudice, that “the problem with regard to most old music is not to determine a single, fixed, invariable practice.”¹⁵ And yet in the very next sentence, he made an assertion with which no one involved with opera during the seventeenth or the eighteenth century would have agreed. The real problem, as he put it, was “rather to determine the limits within which the several aspects of performance might have fluctuated without leading to results that the composers would have found unacceptable.”

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 4 Class and Classicism." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 8 Dec. 2024. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-04008.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 4 Class and Classicism. In Oxford University Press, Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries. New York, USA. Retrieved 8 Dec. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-04008.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 4 Class and Classicism." In Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 8 Dec. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-04008.xml