Reviewed by Lucinda Guy

The popularity of graphic and instructional scores, and the resurgence of interest in ‘early music’ since the mid 20th c., brought about a reconfiguring of composer/performer relationships within Western art music. Historically informed performance (and its acronym, HIP) is referenced throughout this collection of essays that explore the “constraints of repertoire, repetition, reproduction and reputation” that occur between the score and the musical act. This contribution to musicology is mostly written from a musician’s perspective, making this primarily a guide for musicians dealing with the interpretation of scores. Chapters are organised chronologically, the first dealing with the performance of medieval scores, the last with Stockhausen and Cage.

Some Performing by the Book contributors move beyond the specialism of interpreting musical notation with findings that are of interest to other kinds of readers and performers of other kinds of texts. Pianist Xianging Lin, in Relocating Ravel’s “sad birds” in alternative forests of place and time, discusses her interest in the decolonisation of Western Art Music through enriching her performance of Ravel’s Oiseaux Triestes by bringing in other artforms—such as the influence on Ravel of Edgar Allen Poe, and a collaboration with an animator, with her process summarised in a beautiful diagram on page 175.

Another chapter of interest to a non-musical readership is Bjorn Schmelzer’s Performing by the book (next to the book you were looking for), which starts with other (non-musical) texts then demonstrates its relevance to musicology. The image of Jesus in the winepress with angels squeezing out his essence, as an analogy for squeezing out the essence of a text, could be applied to other kinds of texts and other performers beyond music. Claire Lesser’s closing chapter, in which Derrida’s ideas of reproduction, replication and play are applied to performances of aleatoric scores is again of wider interest beyond musicology.

Much of the remaining chapters dig deeply into the experience of historically informed performance and interpretation from a musician’s perspective and illustrated with extracts of scores. Niels Berentsen’s Mind the Gap uses the example of Fabri’s Eyn Cleyn Parabel, of which a partial manuscript remains, and the problems of reconstructing a performable version, the score of which ends the chapter. In Pluralising the Musical Text, Jonathan Ayerst reports on his own change from “an interpretative musician to an improvising one” in the context of performing works by Baroque composers, in particular JS Bach.

While in A la recherche du chant perdu Elizabeth Dobbin unpicks the relationships between printing houses and salon performances in late 17th Century Paris. Covering 1000 years of Western Art Music history, this volume on lacuna necessarily has many lacunae of its own, as each chapter takes a narrow, specialist focus on music of a particular place and time. This means that some chapters are of niche interest for specialists but taken as a whole they provide an overview of the problems of historically informed performance. Camilla Kohnken’s From Beethoven Performance to Beethoven Interpretation, George Kennaway’s Nineteenth Century Texts in the Twenty-first Century, Kate Bennett Wadsworth’s The Flexible Text and Nir Cohen-Schalit's The Romantic Conductor Scholar all place their focus on the 19th Century with only Clare Lesser’s chapter, The Virgin Act moving the discussion to John Cage. This results in a concentration of studies of an era not particularly noted for improvisation and flexibility. More chapters with a contemporary focus would make for a more rounded discussion.

Whether by improvisation, emphasising different qualities, or expanding musical sensing through other artforms, the potential for music to be reborn each time it is performed has particular relevance for composers, musicians and audiences since the rise in aleatoric music of the 1960s, and dominance of recorded music over live performance. As Jonathan Ayerst writes, “A thread that runs through this volume is how to overcome the tyranny of the historical ‘text’ in classical music by instead creating new relationships, new ways of perceiving canonic works” (p. 63).