The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music

Recent decades have seen a major increase of interest in historical performance practice, but until now there has been no comprehensive reference tool available on the subject. This fully up-to-date, illuminating and accessible volume will assist readers in rediscovering and recreating as closely as possible how musical works may originally have sounded. Focusing on performance, this Encyclopedia contains entries in categories including issues of style, techniques and practices, the history and development of musical instruments, and the work of performers, scholars, theorists, composers and editors. It features contributions from more than 100 leading experts who provide a geographically varied survey of both theory and practice, as well as evaluation of and opinions on the resolution of problems in period performance. This timely and ground breaking book will be an essential resource for students, scholars, teachers, performers and audiences.

List of illustrations; List of music examples; List of contributors; Editors' preface; List of abbreviations; Selected treatises commonly cited in abbreviated forms; A-Z general entries; Index.

Colin Lawson is Director of the Royal College of Music, London. He is a world-renowned period clarinettist and has played principal in most of Britain's leading period orchestras, with which he has recorded and toured worldwide. He has published extensively and is co-editor, with Robin Stowell, of a series of Cambridge Handbooks to the Historical Performance of Music as well as of The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (Cambridge, 2012).
Robin Stowell is Emeritus Professor of Music at Cardiff University. As a violinist he has performed, broadcast and recorded with the Academy of Ancient Music and other period ensembles. He is the author of Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985) and his other major publications include The Early Violin and Viola (Cambridge, 2001) and three Cambridge Companions – to the violin (1992), cello (1999) and string quartet (2003).