Historically informed performance
An approach to performing music that uses historical evidence to guide choices about instruments, technique, tuning, tempo, and style.
Historical musical instruments: Instruments preserved from earlier periods or built to reproduce their designs and materials. Instrument construction changes timbre, balance, articulation, and the techniques available to performers.
Cecilia Society: A nineteenth-century British organization that promoted the study and performance of early music. Its concerts and scholarship helped establish an institutional interest in older repertories.
Urtext edition: A musical score edition intended to present the earliest or most authoritative text with minimal editorial additions. Comparing score sources helps distinguish a composer's notation from later editorial decisions.
Modern instrument performance: Performance using instruments built to modern standards and commonly used in contemporary concert life. It differs in instrument design, sound, and often technique from period-instrument practice.
Historical performance practice: The study and reconstruction of conventions governing how music was performed in a particular historical period. It supplies evidence about ornamentation, articulation, ensemble roles, and phrasing.
Arnold Dolmetsch: A French-born musician and instrument maker who helped revive the performance of early music in Britain. His instrument building and performances made historical reconstruction publicly audible.
Primary source: An original document or object created during the period being studied. Treatises, instruments, letters, and scores provide direct evidence for performance choices.
Romantic performance practice: Performance conventions associated with nineteenth-century musical culture, including its approaches to timing, tone, and expression. Its inherited expressive habits can conflict with evidence for earlier repertories.
Historically informed tuning: The use of tuning systems supported by historical evidence for a work or period. Period-appropriate pitch relationships alter the color and consonance of a performance.
Wanda Landowska: A Polish harpsichordist who helped restore the instrument to concert life in the twentieth century. Her influential Bach performances advanced the revival, though often with modernized instruments.