1st Edition
Historical Performance and New Music Aesthetics and Practices
The worlds of new music and historically informed performance might seem quite distant from one another. Yet, upon closer consideration, clear points of convergence emerge. Not only do many contemporary performers move easily between these two worlds, but they often do so using a shared ethos of flexibility, improvisation, curiosity, and collaboration—collaboration with composers past and present, with other performers, and with audiences.
Bringing together expert scholars and performers considering a wide range of issues and case studies, Historical Performance and New Music—the first book of its kind—addresses the synergies in aesthetics and practices in historical performance and new music. The essays treat matters including technologies and media such as laptops, printing presses, and graphic notation; new music written for period instruments from natural horns to the clavichord; personalities such as the pioneering singer Cathy Berberian; the musically “omnivorous” ensembles A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth; and composers Luciano Berio, David Lang, Molly Herron, Caroline Shaw, and many others.
Historical Performance and New Music presents pathbreaking ideas in an accessible style that speaks to performers, composers, scholars, and music lovers alike. Richly documented and diverse in its methods and subject matter, this book will open new conversations about contemporary musical life.
List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Introduction
Part One: Aesthetics and Media
Chapter 1. Kimary Fick and Jason Fick: Unfixed Media: On the Aesthetics of HIP and Interactive Computer Music
Chapter 2. Drake Andersen: Open-Source Performance Practice: The Laptop as an Instrument of Musical Democracy
Chapter 3. Loren Ludwig: Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival
Chapter 4. Rebecca Cypess David Hyun-su Kim, and Elly Toyoda: Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation: Reading Pre-Twentieth-Century Scores Through the Lens of an Avant-Garde Notation
Part Two: New Music for Old Instruments
Chapter 5. Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice: Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices: Vibrato, Historically Informed Performance, and New Music
Chapter 6. Matteo Gemolo: A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute: Tradition as a Key to Innovation
Chapter 7. Francis Knights: The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music
Chapter 8. J. Drew Stephen: A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance
Chapter 9. Rebecca Cypess: Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)
Part Three: Case Studies
Chapter 10. Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling: Feeding the Flexible Omnivore: Collaborative Systems in A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth
Chapter 11. Kailan R. Rubinoff: The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian
Chapter 12. Victoria Aschheim: The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects
Bibliography, Audio, and Audio-Visual Sources
Index
List of contributors
Drake Andersen
is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College. His research examines the forces that shape musicians’ choices in performance. His article "Hearing Epistemic Sound in Experimental (Music) Systems, 1958–73" recently appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music (2022).
Victoria Aschheim
is a Lecturer in music at Dartmouth College. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She studies American music and its relations to civic life. Her essay on Tyshawn Sorey’s Autoschediasms appears in Tempo (January 2023).Musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her publications include Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016).
Sarah Darling
enjoys a varied musical career as a performer and educator on viola and Baroque violin. She is a member of A Far Cry and Boston Baroque, serves on the faculty of the Longy School of Music, and co-directs the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra.
Jason Fick
is Coordinator of Music Technology and Production at Oregon State University. His research explores relationships between commercial and experimental media and has been published by Audio Engineering Society, Organised Sound, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Journal of General Music Education, and College Music Society.Kimary Fick
, Instructor of Music History at Oregon State University, is a musicologist and historical flutist. Her research examines the intersection of music and aesthetics in the eighteenth century and has been published in Women and Music, Early Modern Women, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy.Flutist and author Matteo Gemolo holds a doctorate in music performance from Cardiff University. He regularly performs with internationally renowned early music ensembles. As a soloist, he has recorded several CDs for Arcana (Outhere Music). He is the music curator of Coudenberg Sound Box Fest (Brussels).
Estelí Gomez
is Assistant Professor of Voice at Lawrence University. Praised for her "clear, bright voice" (New York Times), she is a founding member of the Grammy-award-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth and a specialist in both early and new repertoires. Gomez holds degrees from Yale and McGill.
David Hyun-su Kim
is regarded as "a performer of artistry, integrity, and interest who rivals Golden Age pianists" (Early Music America) and "among the finest pianists of his generation" (WholeNote). He holds degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Cornell Universities and recently released a much-acclaimed disc of Robert Schumann performed on a 19th-century piano. davidkimpiano.comFrancis Knights
is a Fellow and Tutor of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, with research interests in manuscript studies, performance practice and organology. He has recently performed complete cycles of Bach’s clavier works and the virginalists, and is currently completing books on music analysis and modern clavichord music.Rachael Lansang
serves as Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Mannes School of Music. She holds a PhD in Musicology from Rutgers University, and her research interests include vocal pedagogy, music and gender studies, and contemporary opera and musical theater.Loren Ludwig
is a music historian and performer based in Baltimore, MD, and a co-founder of LeStrange Viols, ACRONYM, and Science Ficta. His work, which has appeared in BACH and EMAg, among others, explores forgotten moments in the history of instruments, practices, and ideas.Eric Rice
is Head of the Music Department at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches music history and directs the Collegium. His recent recording with Ensemble Origo, Le nozze in Baviera, explores the performance practices and contexts of moresche, sixteenth-century representations of Black Africans.Kailan R. Rubinoff
is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Recent publications appear in the Journal of Musicology, Early Music, and Music and Protest in 1968 (2013). She is currently writing a book on historical performance in the Netherlands.J. Drew Stephen
is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His articles on natural horn practices have appeared in The Historic Brass Society Journal, the Journal of the Haydn Society of Great Britain, and The Horn Call.Elly Toyoda
is Visiting Assistant Professor of Violin at Sunderman Conservatory of Music, Gettysburg College. She holds degrees from Oberlin, Yale, and Rutgers, where her doctoral thesis was titled "Musical Paradoxes in the Violin Works of Olivier Messiaen." She regularly premieres works by Martin Bresnick and others.
Biography
Rebecca Cypess, musicologist and historical keyboardist, is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her publications include Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016).
Estelí Gomez is Assistant Professor of Voice at Lawrence University. Praised for her “clear, bright voice” (New York Times), she is a founding member of the Grammy-award-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth and a specialist in both early and new repertoires. Gomez holds degrees from Yale and McGill.
Rachael Lansang serves as Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Mannes School of Music. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Rutgers University, and her research interests include vocal pedagogy, music and gender studies, and contemporary opera and musical theater.
The early music revival and the new music scene have been inspiring each other and cross-pollinating for several decades. Historical Performance and New Music: Aesthetics and Practices presents a groundbreaking and comprehensive exploration of the dynamic relationship between these two domains by bringing together first-hand testimonies from some of the most authoritative, experienced, and original voices in both scholarship and practice. This pioneering work delves into the intertwining threads that connect early and new music, shedding new light on performance practice, instrumentarium, and notation. It is a must-read for composers and performers immersed in both realms, encouraging a reevaluation of the historical context of the early music revival and a broader outlook on contemporary repertoire, to the extent of redefining the boundaries of historical performance.
-Alon Schab, author of A Performer's Guide to Transcribing, Editing and Arranging Early Music
