HISTORICAL PERFORMANCE: THEORY, PRACTICE, INTERDISCIPLINARITY INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON, 20–22 MAY 2016

In this report I will focus on topics related to eighteenth-century music, which included papers on basso-continuo practice, vocal technique and ornamentation, and theatrical performance, and I will conclude with comments on the plenary sessions. To provide a chronological perspective, the second paper on this session, by Shanti Nachtergaele (Pennsylvania State University), focused on double-bass performance practice in the nineteenth century, advocating a greater variety of pedagogical methods based on primary sources. [...]Erich Hoeprich (Indiana University) considered pedagogical shifts in wind training at the Paris Conservatoire in the session ‘Music Conservatory Curricula’, and the second of two sessions on source studies and methodology included papers by Edward Higginbottom (University of Oxford), who analysed rhetorical speech patterns in eighteenth-century French instrumental music, and Yo Tomita (Queen's University of Belfast), who discussed the interpretation of different types of quaver beam in J. S. Bach's manuscripts. [...]Adam Knight Gilbert (University of Southern California) demonstrated that deep knowledge of sol-fa can help us understand the improvisatory origins of fifteenth-century counterpoint, while making philosophical connections between the Guidonian hand and Aristotle's Categories, a treatise popular in the fifteenth century that defines objects and ideas according to attributes such as quantity, position, relation and time, and theorized that Guidonian visualization techniques can be extended to instrumental practice.