Volatile object

Following both theoretical and practical research into historical performance practices (which, although far from complete, have themselves become the subject of research in the third generation), for some years now the focus has increasingly been on something even more ephemeral: improvisation. As a counter-concept to the work and its weighty aesthetic character, it is inconceivable without it - from a small-format ornamentation of the notation to a supplementary concert cadenza to a large-format composition.

Anyone looking for suggestions for further reflection will therefore be pleased to refer to this Volume Beyond Notes. Improvisation in Western Music of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries However, it is not a handbook, as the title might suggest. Rather, the volume is an ordinary conference report (La Spezia, 2010) with a total of 20 contributions - and thus hardly more than as many individual aspects, which sometimes complement each other at the edges, but which reveal painful gaps even in the overview. The editor is aware of this and does not try to hide it in the foreword. This makes the almost consistently high quality of the articles published in English or Italian all the more decisive, even if one would have liked to have seen fewer details in the topics covered, but instead a view of the whole, as Martin Kaltenecker (The Fantasy-Principle), for example, has succeeded in doing in the introduction.

The individual aspects, which range from Portuguese music for five-string guitar, the violin playing of Tartini, Bériot and Paganini, the keyboard skills of a Hummel and a Clara Wieck to the singing of passages in Rossini and Donizetti, give the impression of a subject that is difficult to systematize. In any case, the headings organizing the table of contents provide orientation - and reveal the corresponding gaps: The field of organ music alone, which can hardly be surveyed across all centuries and styles, is only represented by a text of just five and a half pages (on Louis Vierne). So the volume is ultimately only aimed at specialists, but it will hopefully find a home in many libraries. As always with Brepols, the binding is excellent.

Beyond Notes. Improvisation in Western Music of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. by Rudolf Rasch, (= Speculum Musicae vol. 16), 387 p., € 100.00, Brepols, Turnhout 2011, ISBN 978-2-503-54244-7