TY - JOUR
AU - Bandy, Dorian
AB - Abstract This article examines the interplay of performing technique and compositional structure in the works of four violinist-composers from late 17th-century German-speaking lands: Johann Jakob Walther, Johann Paul von Westhoff, Heinrich Biber and Johann Georg Pisendel. Focusing on these musicians’ complex polyphonic writing, the article argues that the physical techniques necessary to perform their works—specifically, those developed as a corrective to the challenges of pre-chinrest shifting—are associated with a particular way of conceptualizing and imagining counterpoint on the violin. The article goes on to trace the legacy of violinistic counterpoint in the music of later composers, including in Johann Sebastian Bach’s unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Trio, op.9 no.1. Along the way, the article speculates as to whether the musical imaginations of past composers, performers and listeners are accessible to modern-day enquiry. It concludes by arguing that a lack of explicit documentary evidence need not be an impediment in the investigation of historical practices, providing an alternative to the ‘positivistic’ approach often criticized in recent discussions of historically informed performance. The tradition of polyphonic violin playing that flourished in 17th-century German lands comprises one of the richest chapters in the history of the virtuoso composer-performer. The violin sonatas of Johann Jakob Walther (1650–1717), Johann Paul von Westhoff (1656–1705) and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) have long been recognized as an apogee of early writing for the instrument. The techniques called for in these works encompass every important facet of the violinist’s art, and are so advanced that David Boyden likened their authors’ instrumental innovations to those of Nicolò Paganini and Louis Spohr.1 Yet the synthesis of composition and performance attained by Walther, Westhoff and Biber lies not only in their dazzling virtuosity, but in their equally striking artistic ambitions. Their works contain the most complex chromaticism and sophisticated polyphony found in any violin music before Johann Sebastian Bach, and their handling of through-composed sets—seen in Biber’s ‘Mystery’ Sonatas and in the structural plans of Westhoff’s suites—suggests a degree of cyclic coherence unusual before the rise of the ‘opus concept’ in the 18th century.2 In all, these musicians brought the acts of composition and performance into a rare degree of technical, musical and aesthetic alignment. How did the skills associated with composition and performance interact in these violinists’ hands and minds? Despite their importance both in the history of the violin and in the evolution of instrumental forms, little has been said on the topic, with most scholarly work focusing either on comparisons of their virtuoso techniques to those of contemporaneous Italian violinists, or on the symbolic and extra-musical meanings attached to their sonatas.3 One reason for this oversight may involve the elusive nature of compositional creativity. Rigorous investigations of the compositional process often rely on sketch studies, paper and ink analyses, and other forms of research involving concrete textual sources. For the violinist-composer, however, musical thought occurs as much on the fingerboard as on the manuscript leaf, and is thus poorly captured by written documentation. As a result, the violinist-composer’s imagination—that inner world where tactile instrumental technique meets the more abstract criteria underpinning musical creation—remains to a large extent beyond the reach of documentary evidence. In the following pages, I attempt to cast light on the musical imaginations of four violinist-composers active in German-speaking lands in the late 17th century and early 18th century: Walther, Westhoff, Biber and their younger contemporary Johann Georg Pisendel (1688–1755). In particular, I argue that the contrapuntal writing in their sonatas was demonstrably shaped by the physical techniques of violin playing in use during their lifetimes—and that these techniques, in turn, fostered a distinct way of hearing, understanding and, ultimately, imagining musical structures. Details of historical instrumental technique, to say nothing of the broader topics I discuss, are often considered to be either unknown or unknowable, yet I hope to show that a lack of direct evidence need not impede the search for historical understanding. Indeed, one purpose of my investigation is to model an approach by which such knowledge, ephemeral though it is, might be recovered. I begin with relatively uncontroversial details drawn from contemporary treatises, but move swiftly beyond them, focusing on the types of musical thought that may have given rise to this rich body of repertory. I end by briefly exploring the legacy of contrapuntal, violinistic practices in the works of later string-playing composers, including Bach and the young Beethoven. Mechanics of violin technique in 17th-century German lands In the 17th century, the physical, mechanical and stylistic elements of the violinist’s craft were not governed by a single technical standard, but varied according to national tradition, stylistic mores and individual musicians’ preferences.4 Nonetheless, virtually all evidence from before the 18th century suggests that players held the violin against the chest or arm, rather than on the shoulder. The weight of the instrument would then be supported entirely in the left hand, without assistance from the chin. Although this practice was most likely in use across Europe, it is particularly well documented in German sources. In addition to the many northern European paintings and drawings that depict violinists balancing their instruments at various angles against the torso, the extant treatises are unanimous: Michael Praetorius, 1618–19: ‘Viola, viola da bracio and violino da brazzo; is otherwise called a Geige or a fiddle by common folk, and is called “da braccio” because it is held on the arm.’5 Georg Falck, 1688: ‘Place the violin on the left side of the chest; the instrument should therefore lean a little downward to the right.’6 Daniel Merck, 1695: ‘One should hold the violin nicely straight under the left breast, not resting the arm against the body, but leaving it free.’7 Daniel Speer, 1697: ‘The remaining [skills], such as holding the violin correctly in the fist on the breast … a true teacher will know to show to his pupil.’8 The ‘Musicalische Schlissl’ of Johann Jacob Prinner (1677) is sometimes cited as an exception: If one wants to master the violin, then one must hold it under the chin … and the violin must be held so firmly with the chin that one has no reason to hold it with the left hand, because it would otherwise be impossible that I [sic] could run quickly from high to low, or to play in tune, unless one held the violin with the right hand to keep it from falling … disregarding respected Virtuosi that I have known, who didn’t observe this, and just placed the violin on the breast.9 Although it is certainly possible that some amateur violinists used the chin to balance the instrument, Prinner’s strangely ambiguous wording calls into question the significance of his remarks. Prinner writes that it would be impossible for him to shift quickly without the support of his chin, but not that such shifts are impossible in principle. (This prefigures Leopold Mozart’s similarly equivocal statement that the violin should be held against the neck unless ‘by long practice’ the player has learned to support it on the chest.10) Since Prinner was best known as a keyboardist, this comment may say more about his own violinistic shortcomings than about mainstream practices. Prinner himself acknowledges as much, conceding that the most gifted performers—probably a reference to Biber and Schmelzer, whom he knew in Salzburg—played chin-off. The most obvious challenge posed by chin-off violin technique involves the mechanics of shifting. In ‘modern’ violin playing, when the chin is used to hold the instrument, the entire left arm—fingers, thumb, hand and wrist—is free to move along the fingerboard as a single unit. When playing chin-off, by contrast, the left hand must not only finger notes on the instrument, but support the instrument’s weight. In order to shift, the violinist must therefore move the fingers independently from the thumb, hand and wrist in such a way that the thumb (and perhaps the lower portion of the hand as well) can provide continuous support, while the playing-fingers move incrementally from one position to the next. The only contemporary author to treat this problem in detail was Geminiani, who advised that the fingers should effect the shift first, with the thumb following: ‘It must be observed that in drawing back the Hand from the 5th, 4th and 3rd Order to go to the first, the Thumb cannot, for Want of Time, be replaced in its natural Position; but it is necessary it should be replaced at the second Note’.11 Although no known written source, German or not, provides details on the use of the rest of the hand, contemporary iconography suggests that the palm was held flat against the neck of the violin, adding further support. Paintings by German- and Dutch-speaking artists of the mid 17th century often depict violinists with wrists inverted, and violins held at the base of the thumb and across the lower palm (illus.1). The thumb itself generally protrudes some distance above the instrument, and may have been used to stop the occasional a on the G string, as shown in illustration 2. Although the images given here originated outside the circles of the specific violinist-composers discussed in this article, their painters are nonetheless closer geographically than those working in Italy. Illustration 3, particularly clear in its portrayal of left-hand technique, was painted by Peter Lely, an artist of German birth living in London; a similar migratory path was followed by a number of contemporaneous violinists, including Thomas Baltzar. Illus. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Theodore van Baburen (called ‘Dirk’), c.1595–1623/4, ‘The Concert’ (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (inv. no. ГЭ-772); Bridgeman Art Library) Illus. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Theodore van Baburen (called ‘Dirk’), c.1595–1623/4, ‘The Concert’ (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (inv. no. ГЭ-772); Bridgeman Art Library) Illus. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656), ‘The Violin Player’ (Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. no. 1107)) Illus. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656), ‘The Violin Player’ (Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. no. 1107)) Illus. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Sir Peter Lely (1618–80), A man playing a violin, possibly a portrait of the artist (Bridgeman Art Library) Illus. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Sir Peter Lely (1618–80), A man playing a violin, possibly a portrait of the artist (Bridgeman Art Library) When playing chin-off, the span of each shift is limited by the distance the fingers can stretch while the thumb and hand maintain fixed contact with the instrument. This generally means that shifts are incremental: moving through consecutive positions rather than leaping from one end of the fingerboard to the other. Although there are reasons to believe that this constraint loosened somewhat as violin repertory and players’ abilities evolved in lockstep through the first half of the 18th century, indirect evidence suggests that it was firmly entrenched in the hands of 17th-century German virtuosi. It would be easy to surmise that the challenge of shifting hindered the creative freedom of those who wrote for the violin. However, virtuoso violinist-composers did not treat such difficulties as compositional stumbling-blocks, but found ways to play up the challenges they present. In Johann Jakob Walther’s 1676 collection Scherzi da violino solo, incremental shifts are woven throughout the display episodes. All contemporaneous violinist-composers used sequences to facilitate shifting, but in Walther’s hands the gesture becomes a virtuoso trope in its own right. His sonatas make no compromise between virtuosity and playability; instead, they flamboyantly maximize the difficulties facing the performer. The sequences shown in example 1 are diatonic, requiring the violinist to keep track of a changing pattern of tones and semitones both within and between the positions, while also adjusting to the ever-diminishing distances of the notes themselves as the hand moves up the string. In the passage shown in (a) in example 1, Walther initially allows the player to spend a bar in each position, giving the hand ample time to adjust, before intensifying the rate of shifting as the hand reaches fourth, fifth and sixth positions. In other cases, Walther’s sequences ascend still faster. The dizzying passages shown as (b) and (c) in example 1 are especially challenging, since the hand must move haltingly but continuously up and down the fingerboard, stopping for only the duration of a quaver in each position. Thus, if it is often tempting to describe historical instrumental techniques in terms of the apparent limitations they impose (for instance, assuming that a lack of chin support prevented violinists from shifting freely, which in turn prevented composers from writing certain gestures in certain ranges), the actual relationship between technical difficulty and compositional creativity is far more complex. Indeed, in many cases technical challenges may have spurred violinist-composers to explore musical ideas that they might not have discovered through thought alone. One example of this productive symbiosis involves the relationship between chin-off technique and contrapuntal violin playing. As described above, violinists who played without chin support most likely carried the weight of the instrument by flattening the left thumb and palm against the neck and fingerboard. When the hand is positioned in this way, with wrist bent and index finger gently pulled back, the violinist is able to span a 5th on any string (rather than the usual 4th) with no additional physical strain. (Again, although this playing position is not described explicitly in contemporary treatises, it is shown in northern European iconography, much of which depicts the index finger extending backwards from the flattened hand. This extension is visible in illustration 2, and implied by the angle of the hand in illustration 1 and illustration 3.) This adjustment represents only a slight change to the bearing of the hand and fingers, yet a violinist whose hand encompasses a 5th can play closed-position triads across three strings—and, as a result, can use the hand much as a keyboard player might, exploring chords, harmonic progressions and complex counterpoint without making concessions based on the tuning of the strings. The earliest closed-position triads for violin appear in the sonatas of Walther (see, for instance, the arpeggiated F major triad near the end of (a) in example 1, played across the G, D and A strings), but they are a staple of other unaccompanied contrapuntal works as well, particularly the suites by Walther’s pupil Johann Paul von Westhoff (ex.2). The proliferation of closed-position triads in 17th-century German violin repertory suggests that their characteristic hand-shape was familiar enough that it could be used even in published works that would circulate beyond the violinist-composer’s immediate circle. Ex.1 Open in new tabDownload slide Johann Jakob Walther, Sonata VIII from Scherzi da violino solo (Dresden, 1676), excerpts, with editorial fingerings Ex.1 Open in new tabDownload slide Johann Jakob Walther, Sonata VIII from Scherzi da violino solo (Dresden, 1676), excerpts, with editorial fingerings Ex.2 Open in new tabDownload slide Johann Paul von Westhoff, Suite II for unaccompanied violin (Dresden, 1696), Gigue Ex.2 Open in new tabDownload slide Johann Paul von Westhoff, Suite II for unaccompanied violin (Dresden, 1696), Gigue Towards the contrapuntal imagination: polyphony, scordatura, variation The techniques I have discussed so far involve physical aspects of violin playing: scale fingerings, the mechanics of shifting, and the angle of the hand. Yet these tactile details also carry implications for the intellects and imaginations of those who practise them. Musical instruments are not only devices for producing sounds; they are also tools with which an experienced player can externalize and conceptualize musical processes. This utility is perhaps most readily apparent in the case of the keyboard, since its physical layout allows for the easy visualization and manipulation of intervals, chords and harmonic progressions—and it therefore comes as no surprise that the keyboard often serves as a case-study for the intersections of instrumental technique and compositional craft. The burgeoning literature on partimenti and solfeggi speaks broadly to this alignment, since much of it presupposes a productive link between the hands and minds of 18th-century harpsichordists;12 however, more specific arguments have also been explored, for instance in a recent study claiming that J. S. Bach’s contrapuntal structures were shaped as much by his physical approach to keyboard playing (particularly by constraints governing the layout, range and figuration of individual voices in works with three or more parts) as they were by purely compositional considerations.13 The intellectual and imaginative implications of violin technique are equally revealing. In the incremental shifting style encoded in Walther’s display passages, hand-positions are not measured against fixed points on the fingerboard (‘third position’, ‘fourth position’, as in modern violin technique), but in relation either to surrounding notes in the scalar sequence, or, more importantly, the ever-changing location of the thumb. Such a technique is necessarily relational. The player is forced to think actively in terms of intervallic distance and scalar patterns: two ingredients whose manipulation was fundamental to the rhetorical concepts of inventio and elaboratio as they were understood in contemporary compositional theory.14 Although composers could certainly gain an understanding of motivic manipulation through strictly theoretical means, doing so with the tactile aid of the violin may have offered advantages not available to those who played other instruments. For instance, whereas the topography of the keyboard’s natural and accidental keys makes some motivic transformations more convenient than others, the violin fingerboard imposes no such limitation, allowing the free manipulation of motifs all along a given string. The same applies to movements between the strings: the violin’s tuning makes it trivially easy for a player to conceptualize transpositions by a 5th. It is probably no accident that the violin music of Walther and Westhoff is dominated by extended circle-of-5ths progressions, as if their tactile intuitions both responded to and reinforced this structural fundament of 17th-century musical style. Even the challenge of chin-off shifting may have offered hidden advantages for the compositional imagination. Because a player’s opportunities to shift were somewhat limited, melodies exceeding the compass of an individual position would often have been played across multiple strings, rather than by shifting up and down continuously on a single string.15 As a result, violinists would have become familiar with the high positions on all four strings, not just the E string. Some modest evidence for this familiarity is shown in example 1a, in Walther’s descent from sixth position to second position. Although there are opportunities to continue down to the more usual resting place of first position, it is clear from the ensuing arpeggiated triads that Walther expects the player to remain in second position. Indeed, he seems to expect the player to remain there until the end of the sonata, where the final flourish (though notated as individual pitches) may be fingered as if in three voices, across the D, A and open E strings. The Austro-German repertory contains countless other examples of high playing on low strings: for instance, a bariolage passage in Walther’s later collection, Hortulus chelicus, and a movement titled ‘Imitatione delle campane’ in Westhoff’s Sonata no.3 in D minor from his Dresden 1694 collection (see (a) and (b) in ex.3). Both passages are played by stopping notes in third through sixth positions on the G and D strings, while the open A string serves as a pedal. Ex.3 Open in new tabDownload slide (a) Walther, Suite XXIV in D major, from Hortulus chelicus (Mainz, 1688), finale, with editorial fingerings; (b) Westhoff, Violin Sonata no.3 in D minor (Dresden, 1694), third movement ‘Imitatione delle campane’, with editorial fingerings Ex.3 Open in new tabDownload slide (a) Walther, Suite XXIV in D major, from Hortulus chelicus (Mainz, 1688), finale, with editorial fingerings; (b) Westhoff, Violin Sonata no.3 in D minor (Dresden, 1694), third movement ‘Imitatione delle campane’, with editorial fingerings These examples point to the most crucial imaginative difference between pre- and post-chinrest techniques. A violinist who develops a facility with high playing on all four strings, and, as a result, who regularly plays melodies across two or more strings, necessarily develops a sense of the polyphonic possibilities inherent in the relations between notes, intervals and melodic motifs. To such a violinist, even a simple, homophonic passage might be experienced as a series of double-stops in potentia, evoking hand-shapes and fingerings more usually associated with explicitly chordal playing. Once ingrained, this tactile vocabulary of voicings and harmonic patterns could be applied within virtually any melodic passage. The experienced violinist would, as a result, be predisposed to find contrapuntal significance almost anywhere. It is in this light that we should understand scordatura, the deliberate mis-tuning of the violin strings associated most famously with Heinrich Biber’s ‘Mystery’ Sonatas. Scordatura is often described either as an expedient to facilitate chordal and sonic possibilities not easily achieved on a normally tuned instrument, or (in the case of Biber) in terms of its symbolic and programmatic associations.16 Although such resonances are certainly present in much scordatura writing, it can also be seen as a device that augments the contrapuntal imagination of the violinist by fostering new kinds of cross-string, polyphonic patterning. In Sonata VI from Biber’s collection published in Nuremberg in 1681 (one of his few scordatura solo works not included in the ‘Mystery’ cycle), the E string is tuned down one tone to D, with the result that notes previously playable only on the A string (such as third-finger d′′ or fourth-finger e′′) are now available one string higher. In addition to offering a new set of closed-position triads (for instance, a G minor chord spread across the D string, A string and upper open D string), this tuning allows the performer to adopt Walther-esque sequential fingering patterns. A simple example occurs when a descending figure is played first on the D string, then on the A string and, finally, on the upper D string (ex.4). In the standard tuning, this melody would require a new fingering on the top string—and, indeed, the uppermost sequential step would not be playable on a single string, but would be shared across the E and A strings. In Biber’s scordatura, however, the gesture is arranged so that the three-part imitation is not only heard, but felt in the hand. Even more, because each repetition of the motif is fingered the same way on each string, the performer’s attention is drawn to the ‘horizontal’ relations between fingers and notes across the instrument. The physical pattern emerges out of the cross-string contrapuntal thought so central to this repertory. Ex.4 Open in new tabDownload slide Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Sonata VI from Sonatae 1681 (Nuremberg, 1681), with editorial fingerings Ex.4 Open in new tabDownload slide Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Sonata VI from Sonatae 1681 (Nuremberg, 1681), with editorial fingerings Connections between the violin writing shown in examples 3 and 4, and the musical imaginations of 17th-century violinist-composers, are speculative. Nonetheless, other aspects of technical and compositional norms corroborate the model I have just outlined. Particularly revealing in this respect are the ‘arias with variations’ set over a ground bass that feature centrally in the oeuvres of Walther and Biber. According to a series of perceptive articles by Roman Ivanovitch, the variation genre is unique among musical forms in its potential to lay bare the inner workings of a composer’s mind. Hearing a melody ‘as’ a theme, Ivanovitch argues, means adopting a mindset delicately balanced between analytical intensity and creative flexibility. It is, in his words, to perform a kind of auditory alchemy. It is to begin hearing details, quirks, possibilities; to hypothesize and conjecture, to seek clues, search for principles … We might describe this as listening for potential.17 This view stands in sharp contrast to many theories of elaboratio propounded in 17th- and 18th-century sources, which often frame variation-writing as a mechanical task.18 For Ivanovitch, the elaborative riches extracted from a theme are not products of rote transformation. Instead, they reflect the composer’s idiosyncratic way of hearing, conceptualizing and imagining musical development. It is significant that the variations composed by Walther, Biber and many of their violin-playing German-speaking contemporaries are devoted not to spinning the finely wrought melodic diminutions so common in contemporaneous Italian repertory, but to the accretion of complex double-stops and polyphonic lines, as if these composers’ style of ‘auditory alchemy’ grew directly from their technical preoccupations with polyphony. Even in the most daring and virtuosic of variation sets, the contrapuntal potential of a theme is often realized first, before melodic elaboration begins. In the set of variations on the ‘Aria malincon[ia]’ in Walther’s Scherzi, the initial statement of the ‘Aria’ is interlaced with polyphonic repetitions (see ex.5a). The opening phrase (bars 1–4) is elaborated polyphonically in bars 5–8, and the answering idea (bars 9–12) is elaborated in bars 13–16. The ensuing variations quickly depart from the melodic layout of the original tune, building instead on the chords, voicing and hand-shapes introduced within the theme’s polyphonic setting, as in the ‘Tremolo’ variation shown in example 5b. Only 16 bars of the piece are written without multiple-stops—and even here, the motifs are treated more as arpeggiated chords than as linear melodies (ex.5c). Leaps in the melodic line are always arranged in such a way as to imply chordal fingerings, even though the bow plays separate, individual tones. Ex.5 Open in new tabDownload slide Walther, ‘Aria malincon[ia]’ in E minor, from Scherzi da violino solo: (a) bars 1–16; (b) bars 21–4; (c) bars 39–40 Ex.5 Open in new tabDownload slide Walther, ‘Aria malincon[ia]’ in E minor, from Scherzi da violino solo: (a) bars 1–16; (b) bars 21–4; (c) bars 39–40 Similar contrapuntal elaboration occurs outside Walther’s formal variation sets. Indeed, many movements in the Scherzi follow the same developmental processes as his variations, and as a result a single set of elaborative transformations seems to form the basis for much of his compositional vocabulary. The gigue that closes Sonata IX offers a particularly telling demonstration. The movement is set in two parts, with the second half serving as a de facto contrapuntal variation of the first. Initially, Walther presents two motifs: a decorated version of a descending arpeggio (x), played first by the bass, and then imitated by the violin, and an ascending scale (y), which serves as a countersubject (ex.6a). Throughout the first section, subject and countersubject are passed back and forth between the violin and continuo parts. In the variation, both are absorbed into the violin part, and the bass plays a simplified accompaniment (ex.6b). Ex.6 Open in new tabDownload slide Walther, Sonata IX from Scherzi da violino solo, Gigue: (a) opening; (b) polyphonic variation Ex.6 Open in new tabDownload slide Walther, Sonata IX from Scherzi da violino solo, Gigue: (a) opening; (b) polyphonic variation Composer, performer and listener In terms of musical development, the final movement of Walther’s Sonata IX might seem unremarkable. A mere verbatim repetition of the interplay between subject and countersubject, it uncovers no hidden contrapuntal potential within the theme. Nor does it present any significant new structural or rhetorical insight. The variation uses complex double-stops, and this supports the view that Walther was first and foremost a contrapuntal thinker—yet even this says little that is not already clear from the polyphony of his formal variation sets. The varied repetition of the gigue, however, does suggest an intriguing relationship between the violinist-composer and listener, and suggests a way of approaching the historical imagination. In the variation, the subject and countersubject are, for the first time, absorbed into a single octave. The subject begins on a′′ and descends one octave to an a′ on the open string, while the countersubject does the opposite. Although the contrapuntal content is unaltered from the first half of the gigue, the slight change of register gives rise to a very different melodic experience for the listener. The combination of the two figures within a single octave creates an entirely new melody: one that begins on a′′, descends a 4th, and then reverses direction and returns to the note on which it began. The violinistic polyphony alters the shapes of the original subject and countersubject, and obscures the close relationship between the two halves of the movement. Although a glance at the score shows that the piece is structured as a theme with a contrapuntal variation, this formal identity is known only to the performer. The listener, by contrast, experiences a new set of musical ideas that begins with the familiar (x) but soon unfolds into what seems an entirely new melody and, thus, a new stage in the movement’s development. The intricate, polyphonic interplay is felt by the performer, but not heard. It is in this gap between the musical experiences of performer and listener that we come closest to glimpsing the historical, violinistic imagination. On a purely sonic level (in terms of waves, frequencies and vibrations), the violinist who plays Walther’s gigue encounters the same music as the listener. Yet the violinist’s experience is of two distinct contrapuntal voices, while the listener hears a simpler tune set in 3rds. This difference suggests a profound shift in imaginative perspective, and with it a new structure of aural perception. It is possible to pinpoint the very moment in this gigue when the modes of awareness diverge: at the repeated 3rds (in bar 3, beat 2 of ex.6b), which the violinist, looking at the score and carrying out the physical motions encoded in the passage, understands not as constituting a new melody but as merging two familiar motifs. It is this understanding that Walther himself must have possessed when composing the passage, and probably the same understanding that a violinist of his day, having worked through (x) and (y) in their separate versions, would have felt when playing them in combination. To be sure, the imaginative distance between perceived sound and musical understanding is one we navigate routinely when listening to familiar, canonical repertory. (Consider the opening of the Fugue in D major bwv850 from Book I of Bach’s Wohltemperiertes Clavier, when the third and fourth voices enter in unison with the continuation of the previous voice, as well as the work’s ending, when the four voices seem to collapse into a single homophonic texture. In its first and last phrases, bwv850 ‘sounds like’ a fugue only if listeners imaginatively supply the counterpoint.19) To seek the same experience in less familiar repertory can sharpen our awareness of the mechanisms by which we approach ideas and experiences shared by musicians of the past. If the inner worlds of 17th-century violinists and listeners are, to a large extent, lost to time, it is through phrases such as these that the distance is diminished. When imaginative understanding of a composition’s structure extends beyond mere physical sounds, we too may approximate the mindset of Walther and his contemporaries. Despite the intervening centuries, the imaginative experience of past composers, performers and listeners is not entirely inaccessible to our minds and ears. Violin playing and counterpoint in Pisendel and J. S. Bach How did the violinistic imagination continue to develop through the following generations? The obvious starting-point for tracing the influence of Walther, Westhoff and Biber is Johann Georg Pisendel, the Dresden-based virtuoso who penned some of the most difficult violin music of the early 18th century. Much of Pisendel’s output builds upon the technical traditions of his forebears, particularly in its emphasis on complex counterpoint. Indeed, this emphasis is so pronounced in Pisendel’s oeuvre that at times his music seems almost ‘unmelodic’, as though it arose solely through a preoccupation with the violin’s chordal possibilities. Often, the chordal underlay of Pisendel’s melodies is self-evident. Although the second movement of his unaccompanied Sonata in A minor is written almost entirely without the use of multiple-stops, the melodies eschew stepwise motion, instead tracing the outlines of chords and arpeggios (ex.7a).20 All of these gestures are voiced so as to be playable across two or more strings: a reminder that, here too, the listener hears only a single line, yet the violinist’s tactile experience involves hand-shapes associated with complex double-stops and chords. That Pisendel considered these broken chords to hold the same musical function as actual polyphonic writing is suggested when a dissonance prepared with a double-stop is presented through arpeggiation (ex.7b). For Pisendel, the two modes of writing seem interchangeable, with the hand-shape providing continuity that the sound itself lacks. Although such textural shifts can be jarring to a listener, in terms of left-hand violin technique, they are entirely routine, since the physical motions of the left hand are identical regardless of whether the notes are arpeggiated, played individually, or included in a two- or three-part chord. Ex.7 Open in new tabDownload slide Johann Georg Pisendel, Sonata for unaccompanied violin, second movement: (a) bars 1–11; (b) bars 38–46 Ex.7 Open in new tabDownload slide Johann Georg Pisendel, Sonata for unaccompanied violin, second movement: (a) bars 1–11; (b) bars 38–46 In an unaccompanied sonata, the performer must function as both soloist and accompanist. Pisendel’s reliance on contrapuntal techniques in this work is therefore unsurprising. Yet his sonatas for violin and continuo feature equally disjunct, chordal writing. In his Sonata in D major,21 long stretches of virtuoso passagework are built around arpeggiated chords not unlike those found in the works of Westhoff (whose arpeggiated writing is shown in ex.3, above). Of course, Pisendel’s technique had advanced beyond that of his teachers, and his treatment introduces difficulties not present in the works of earlier violinist-composers. Whereas Westhoff and Walther tended to use open-string pedals in the topmost voice while fingering notes on the lower strings, Pisendel’s open-string pedals are often assigned to an inner voice. In these cases, the violinist must play complex double-stops on non-adjacent strings—itself a considerable challenge since the proximity of the fingers in more familiar settings is partly what orientates the hand and ensures good intonation, but one rendered all the more vexing when the violinist must also avoid making unintentional contact with the intervening open string. This technique reaches its apogee in the last movement cadenza from Pisendel’s Sonata in D major, when the violinist plays a series of parallel 10ths on the D and E strings, from third through eighth positions, while the open A string serves as a pedal (ex.8a). A similar passage occurs in the Sonata in C minor,22 where an arpeggiated pattern is set on the G, A and E strings (ex.8b). Although strictly speaking, this phrase lacks a pedal, the slurred broken-chord figures that leap across the silent D string present the same technical challenge. In both examples, Pisendel maintains the use of incremental, stepwise shifts associated with the virtuoso display-passages of Walther and Westhoff. However, if in some ways Pisendel perpetuates the gestural thinking of the earlier composers, the middle-voice pedal points introduce a distinctly new complication. The player must continue to measure minute, ‘vertical’ distances between notes, but now does so without the benefit of physical familiarity that comes with more standard double-stopping patterns. Ex.8 Open in new tabDownload slide (a) Pisendel, Sonata in D major, third movement, bars 149–60; (b) Pisendel, Sonata in C minor, second movement, bars 10–13 Ex.8 Open in new tabDownload slide (a) Pisendel, Sonata in D major, third movement, bars 149–60; (b) Pisendel, Sonata in C minor, second movement, bars 10–13 Ex.9 Open in new tabDownload slide Bach, Sonata for unaccompanied violin in C major, bwv1005, fourth movement, bars 13–14 Ex.9 Open in new tabDownload slide Bach, Sonata for unaccompanied violin in C major, bwv1005, fourth movement, bars 13–14 It was against this technical and aesthetic backdrop that Bach composed his unaccompanied violin music. Although it is frequently observed that Bach’s works did not emerge sui generis, but rather as the culmination of a long tradition of polyphonic violin playing, this claim is rarely supported with musical details.23 Bach’s technical approach to the violin shares much with that of Pisendel, not only in the overtly contrapuntal writing in the three unaccompanied fugues and the D minor Ciaccona, but even in many of his ostensibly single-voiced movements. The Corrente and Double from the Partita in B minor bwv1002, for instance, consist primarily of outlined arpeggios which, though played without double-stops, rely on chordal hand-shapes in much the same way as Pisendel’s Unaccompanied Sonata. Whenever Bach’s writing ascends to the upper reaches of the fingerboard, he writes sequential figuration that allows for stepwise shifting. (See, for instance, the final episode with single-line writing (bars 245–73) in the Fuga from the Sonata in C major bwv1005, where the violinist moves incrementally from first position to sixth position and back.) Most of all, Bach’s writing maintains a strict sense of association between compositional voice-leading and the use of specific strings. Thus, in the last movement of the Sonata in C major bwv1005, even passages that initially seem non-contrapuntal often imply multiple, interacting voices. In example 9 the low notes at the start of beats 1 and 3 are to be played on the D string (even the a′ in bar 13), the c′′ and b′ figuration on the A string, and the high g′′ and f′′ on the E string. Here as before, what listeners might experience as a flurry of semiquavers is, within the tactile imagination of the violinist, a contrapuntally coherent interplay of bass, alto and soprano voices. Although the extent of Bach’s engagement with earlier virtuoso violin music is unclear, he almost certainly met Westhoff in Weimar in 1703, where both musicians briefly overlapped as employees of the ducal court.24 But considering that the unaccompanied sonatas and partitas were probably composed between 1718 and 1720, the more likely catalyst was Bach’s encounter with Pisendel in September–October 1717.25 While there is no direct evidence to confirm Pisendel’s role in this phase of Bach’s career, an intriguing possibility is suggested by technical figuration in the Preludio of the Partita in E major bwv1006. This movement features two lengthy bariolage passages which culminate in a sequential descent from fifth position to first position (ex.10a). The sequences are noteworthy not only for their reliance on the usual hallmarks of 17th-century German virtuosity including incremental shifts, an open string pedal and extended arpeggiation, but also for the way they fuse these disparate techniques within a single episode. Interestingly, Bach uses this confluence of devices so prominently in only one other work: the Sonata in E minor bwv1023 (ex.10b), a copy of which survives in Pisendel’s collection.26 This further suggests the likelihood of a close exchange between the two composers—and even, perhaps, that Bach associated these technical manoeuvres specifically with Pisendel. Whatever Bach’s immediate inspiration, his violinistic inheritance is especially apparent in passages such as these. Across the nearly half-century separating his solo works from Walther’s Scherzi, the tactile dimensions of the virtuoso’s craft remained remarkably consistent. Ex.10 Open in new tabDownload slide (a) Bach, Partita in E major, bwv1006, first movement, bars 17–28; (b) Bach, Sonata in E minor, bwv1023, first movement, bars 12–15 Ex.10 Open in new tabDownload slide (a) Bach, Partita in E major, bwv1006, first movement, bars 17–28; (b) Bach, Sonata in E minor, bwv1023, first movement, bars 12–15 Legacies of polyphonic violin playing It is one of the extraordinary paradoxes of the nineteenth century that its greatest violin concertos were written by pianists. 27 So writes Robin Stowell at the outset of his critical handbook on Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. At first glance, Stowell’s comment may seem an exaggeration. There is, after all, nothing inherently paradoxical about a pianist who writes virtuoso music for the violin, the only other instrument with so long and distinguished a solo tradition. His remark is vulnerable to criticism on other grounds as well, particularly given the social and ideological contingencies that shaped the formation of the musical canon. Yet Stowell’s observation raises a legitimate question about the history of the violinist-composer relationship. Music by Walther, Biber, Westhoff and Pisendel—to say nothing of works by their Italian contemporaries Antonio Vivaldi, Arcangelo Corelli, Francesco Maria Veracini, Giuseppe Tartini and Pietro Locatelli—was no less inventive or innovative than those by their keyboard-playing contemporaries. Yet it is striking just how quickly this balance changed at the beginning of the 19th century. Violinists continued to write showpieces, but they would never again match either the compositional ingenuity or the extraordinary influence achieved by their predecessors. It is impossible to attribute such a broad trend to any single cause. Nonetheless, one factor that may have contributed is the changing approach to left-hand technique associated with ‘chin-on’ playing. Midway through the 18th century, treatises begin to suggest that violins should be held above the player’s collarbone and stabilized with the chin—a new technical method that culminated with Louis Spohr’s invention of the chinrest around 1820.28 Chin-on playing relieves the left hand of its role in supporting the instrument, and, as a result, facilitates a style of melodic playing with frequent shifts and portamento on individual strings, rather than the shiftless, cross-string fingerings that were practised previously. Neither stepwise shifting nor contrapuntal fingerings retained their technical currency.29 The instrument’s imaginative affordances, too, would have changed as a result. Contrapuntal and harmonic sophistication would no longer have arisen as a straightforward side-effect of virtuoso playing. Some violinists continued to practise contrapuntal techniques, even when holding the instrument with the chin. Ruggiero Ricci has argued that Paganini’s mastery of the instrument derived in large part from his continued reliance on the pre-chinrest techniques outlined above,30 and a further compelling example is provided by the young Beethoven. Beethoven studied violin with Franz Rovantini and Franz Anton Ries, and although he was by no means a virtuoso, he was skilled enough to hold a position in the viola section of the renowned Bonn court orchestra.31 Beethoven provided fingerings for the first edition of his String Trios op.9 (composed 1797–8 and published in Vienna in 1799),32 and although some of these indicate expressive phrasing, others follow directly from the contrapuntal techniques associated with earlier violinistic conventions. In the last movement of his Trio in G major, op.9 no.1, Beethoven instructs both the violinist and viola player to finger a descending sequence as a two-voiced contrapuntal texture (rather than as a more linear, single-voiced passage) across the instrument’s upper strings (ex.11). Here, the violinist descends from fourth position to first position, and the viola player descends twice from third position to first position (leaping up midway when the upper voice passes to the D string)—all while striking a series of suspensions and resolutions akin to those in bwv1023 (see ex.10b). Beethoven’s contrapuntal fingerings are perfectly compatible with the techniques known to Walther, Westhoff and Pisendel; indeed, they differ from passages in earlier solo works only in the speed with which the hand must move through the series of positions. Charles Rosen has remarked that Beethoven was the most rigorous contrapuntal thinker of his generation, and it is tempting to imagine a link between his reliance on these polyphonic violin techniques and his facility with fugal writing more broadly.33 His fingerings may be symptomatic of the contrapuntal mindset he honed so carefully during his early years of study, and which reached its highest focus in the late string quartets and piano sonatas. Of course, the very fact that Beethoven saw the need to prescribe these fingerings explicitly—fingerings which, less than a century earlier, would most likely have been taken for granted among virtuosi—serves as a reminder of the extent to which new conventions had replaced the old. Ex.11 Open in new tabDownload slide Beethoven, String Trio in G major, op.9 no.1, fourth movement, with Beethoven’s fingerings: (a) violin part, bars 243–6; (b) viola part, bars 237–40 Ex.11 Open in new tabDownload slide Beethoven, String Trio in G major, op.9 no.1, fourth movement, with Beethoven’s fingerings: (a) violin part, bars 243–6; (b) viola part, bars 237–40 Conclusion The arguments I have explored in these pages are, to a large extent, speculative. They are rooted in details from historical sources, and, most of all, they are based upon the musical content of works by Walther, Westhoff, Biber and Pisendel. Yet the underlying explanations, by which I connect instrumental technique with issues of compositional craft, lie, ultimately, beyond the reach of evidence. What, then, is the value of studying them? The answer is to be found, first, in the fact that a broad explanation can provide guidance on matters not settled by the written sources. When our concern remains fixed only on explicit, documentary evidence, there may be little reason to connect a handful of treatises that provide advice on holding the violin to more abstract questions of compositional planning (to say nothing of the 17th-century musical imagination). Yet it is precisely such interconnections that give the explanatory impulse its power and appeal, allowing us to fill in gaps in the evidentiary record and understand matters that resist documentation but nonetheless hold far-reaching interpretative consequences. The issue of whether Walther and Westhoff—or, for that matter, Bach or Beethoven—perceived the violin as a fully capable polyphonic instrument is not an inert historical curiosity, but a question whose answer has the potential to shape our engagement with these composers’ works in numerous ways: not only by influencing the technical choices made by practising violinists, but by rippling out to bear upon larger issues from phrasing and tempo to musical expression and rhetoric, and even to the more academic pursuits of analysis and historical research. All modes of musical engagement are, after all, highly interconnected. In Janet Levy’s exemplary formulation, ‘just as every performance is an interpretation, every interpretation is either a performance or, when written as analysis and criticism, construable as a set of “instructions” for a performance’.34 Explanations, even when they are conjectural, provide a connective fabric that binds together the many ways of approaching and interpreting musical works. Perhaps more important, a study of the musical imagination of 17th-century violinists can provide a model for other historical investigations whose subjects resist more mainstream, positivistic conceptions of the role and use of evidence. For more than three decades, critics of the historical performance movement have diagnosed its practitioners—performers and researchers alike—with a severe ‘objectivist bias’. According to an influential essay by Laurence Dreyfus, historical performance of the mid 1980s was a ‘strictly empirical program’ that eschewed the personal, the subjective, and much else that Dreyfus considered of value in human life.35 Although the culture of early music has relaxed considerably since these polemics were launched, it is still common practice to begin a study of historical performing practices by shoring up the concrete evidence, and moving away from it only with extreme caution. In many cases, however, such an approach can only reveal so much. Reasoning ‘from’ the evidence often means overlooking the vast networks of ideas, practices and causal links that structure musical culture, but which are preserved only obliquely in the historical record. The musical imaginations of past composer-performers constitute just such a network, and similar epistemological barriers can be found in countless other topics as well. Strictly speaking, they are beyond the reach of investigation, but this should not hinder our attempts at understanding. Dorian Bandy is an assistant professor at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, where he teaches musicology and Baroque violin. His current projects include a monograph on Mozart, as well as forthcoming articles on Mozart’s operas and rhetorical features of Beethoven’s improvisations. His recording of Telemann’s 1715 Frankfurt violin sonatas was released in 2018. >email xlink:type="simple">dorian.bandy@mcgill.ca Footnotes 1 D. Boyden, The history of violin playing from its origins to 1761, 3rd edn (Oxford, r/1990), p.223. 2 On the structural plans of Westhoff’s violin works, see R. Aschmann, ‘Das deutsche polyphone Violinspiel im 17. Jahrhundert’ (PhD diss., Universität Zurich, 1962), p.47. On the history of the so-called ‘opus concept’ in the early 18th century, see E. Sisman, ‘Six of one: the opus concept in the 18th century’, in The century of Bach and Mozart: perspectives on historiography, composition, theory, and performance, ed. S. Gallagher and T. Forrest Kelly (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp.79–107, esp. pp.80–85. 3 P. Allsop, ‘Violinistic virtuosity in the 17th century: Italian supremacy or Austro-German hegemony?’, Il Saggiatore Musicale, iii/2 (1996), pp.233–58; J. N. Clements, ‘Aspects of the Ars Rhetorica in the violin music of Heinrich Biber (1644–1704)’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2002). 4 For comprehensive overviews of contemporary technical practices, see P. Walls, ‘Violin fingering in the 18th century’, Early Music, xii/3 (1984), pp.300–315, and J. Tarling, Baroque string playing (St Albans, 2000). 5 ‘Viola, Viola de bracio: Item, Violino da brazzo; Wird sonsten eine Geige/ vom gemeinen Volck aber eine Fiddel/ vnnd daher de bracio genennet/ daß sie uff dem Arm gehalten wird.’ Michael Praetorius, Syntagmatis musici Michaelis Praetorii C. Tomus Secundus De Organographia (Wolfenbüttel, 1619), p.48. 6 ‘die Violin auf der lincken Brust ansetze, doch also daß sie ein wenig gegen der Rechten abwerts sehe.’ Georg Falck, Idea boni cantoris (Nuremberg, 1688), p.190. 7 ‘Die Geige solle man hübsch gerad unter der lincken Brust halten/den Arm nicht auf den Leib setzen/sondern frey halten…’ Daniel Merck, Compendium musicae instrumentalis chelicae (Augsburg, 1695), unpaginated. 8 ‘Das übrige/wie einer die Violin recht in der Faust halten/an die Brust ansetzen … wird ein treuer Informator seinem Lehrling schon wissen zu weisen.’ Daniel Speer, Grund-richtiger/kurtz- leicht- und nöthiger/jetzt wol-vermehrter Unterricht der Musicalischen Kunst. Oder vierfaches Musicalisches Kleeblatt (Ulm, 1697), p.191. 9 ‘Wan man aber dise Violin recht beherschen will, so mueß man solche unter die kheÿ [Kinn] fasßen … und mit der khaÿ die geigen souill fest halte, dß man nicht ursach hat mit der linkhen handt solche zuhalten, weilen eß sunst unmiglich währe, dß ich darmit balt hoch balt nieder lauffen und rein greiffen khundre, eß seÿe dan dß man mit der rechten handt die geigen halten müßte damit sie nicht entfalle … unangesehen ich ansehliche Virtuosen gekhennet, welche solcheß nicht geachtet, und die Violin nur auf die brust gesetzte…’ Johann Jacob Prinner, ‘Musicalischer Schlissel’ (1677), Library of Congress Ms. ml 95 p79, fol.48r. The full text of this passage is reproduced in G. Moens-Haenen, Deutsche Violintechnik im 17. Jahrhundert: ein Handbuch zur Aufführungspraxis (Graz, 2006), p.37. 10 Leopold Mozart, A treatise on the fundamental principles of violin playing, trans. E. Knocker (Oxford, 1986), p.54. 11 Francesco Geminiani, The art of playing on the violin (London, 1751), p.2. Other possible solutions to the problem of chin-off shifting are discussed in Walls, ‘Violin fingering’, pp.305–6, and Boyden, History of violin playing, pp.153–5. 12 See, for instance, R. Gjerdingen, Music in the galant style (New York, 2007), and N. Baragwanath, The solfeggio tradition (New York, 2020). 13 M. Hall, ‘Keyboard technique as contrapuntal structure in J. S. Bach’s clavier works’, Understanding Bach, x (2015), https://bachnetwork.org/understanding-bach/ub10/. 14 Laurence Dreyfus’s account of Bach’s compositional practice is based almost entirely on mechanical transformations applied to scalar and intervallic motifs. See L. Dreyfus, Bach and the patterns of invention (Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp.22–5 and passim. (The typography and vocabulary, which Dreyfus borrows from the world of computing, highlights what he suggests is the mechanical nature of many of these transformations.) 15 Boyden, History of violin playing, p.251. 16 Boyden, History of violin playing, pp.130 and 226. An account of symbolism in Biber’s scordatura can be found in Clements, ‘Aspects of the Ars Rhetorica’. 17 R. Ivanovitch, ‘What’s in a theme? On the nature of variation’, Gamut, iii/1 (2010), pp.1–42, at p.5. 18 As Laurence Dreyfus puts it, many procedures of invention ‘can be formalized as quasi-mechanical functions’. See his Bach and the patterns of invention, p.19. Dietrich Bartel explores a similar mindset in his discussion of historical approaches to melodic figuration and ornaments (‘elocutio’), in Musica poetica: musical-rhetorical figures in German Baroque music (Lincoln, NB, 1997), pp.76–89. 19 This account of Bach’s D major Fugue bwv850, draws on N. Cook, Music, imagination and culture (Oxford, 1990), pp.26–34 and 85ff. R. G. Collingwood defended a useful distinction between ‘hearing’ (referring to literal perception) and ‘listening’ (referring to imaginative perception); see The principles of art (Oxford, 1938), pp.141 and 151. This distinction has been explored further in R. Scruton, The aesthetics of music (New York, 1999), chs.1 and 2. 20 Pisendel’s works survive in manuscript in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Dresden (D-Dl). They are referred to by shelf-mark. The Sonata à Violino Solo senza Basso is Mus. 2421-r-2. 21 D-Dl, Mus. 2421-r-9. 22 D-Dl, Mus. 2201-r-11a. 23 J. Schröder, Bach’s solo violin works: a performer’s guide (New Haven, 2007), pp.39–45. This is also the starting-point of D. Ledbetter, Unaccompanied Bach (New Haven, 2009), ch.1. 24 C. Wolff, Bach’s musical universe: the composer and his work (New York, 2020), p.86. 25 Because Bach’s solo violin works survive only in fair copy, it is difficult to establish the precise date of composition. Wolff claims, based on the handwriting and aspects of the musical style, that Bach began these works no earlier than 1718 and finished them no later than 1720. See Bach’s musical universe, p.88. On Bach’s 1717 encounter with Pisendel, see Ledbetter, Unaccompanied Bach, p.33. 26 D-Dl, Mus. 2405-r-1. 27 R. Stowell, Beethoven: Violin Concerto (Cambridge, 1998), p.11. 28 Although the precise date of invention is unknown, Spohr states in his Violinschule (Vienna, 1832), p.13, that he and other violinists had been using a chinrest for more than ten years. See R. Stowell, Violin technique and performance practice in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Cambridge, 1990), pp.29–30 and 41–5. 29 Changing preferences for fingering and shifting are discussed in detail in Stowell, Violin technique and performance practice, pp.91–103. 30 R. Ricci, Ricci on glissando: the shortcut to violin technique, ed. G. H. Zayia (Bloomington, 2007). 31 Although contemporary accounts of Beethoven’s violin playing are sharply critical, these date from after 1801, and thus after the onset of deafness. For a selection, see C. Brown, ‘Ferdinand David’s editions of Beethoven’, in Performing Beethoven, ed. R. Stowell (Cambridge, 1994), pp.117–49, at pp.117–18. Angus Watson speculates that Beethoven’s abilities in the 1790s must have been formidable, since ‘it is inconceivable that [the Bonn court orchestra] would have admitted run-of-the-mill players to its ranks’. See Beethoven’s chamber music in context (Woodbridge, 2010), p.5. 32 No autograph manuscript survives, but considering the musical and technical import of the fingerings, it is likely that they are by Beethoven—particularly given the control he exerted over printed fingerings in his keyboard music. 33 C. Rosen, ‘Beethoven’s career’, in Critical entertainments: music old and new (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp.105–23, at p.113. 34 J. Levy, ‘Beginning–ending ambiguity: consequences of performance choices’, in The practice of performance, ed. J. Rink (Cambridge, 1995), pp.150–69, at p.150. 35 L. Dreyfus, ‘Early music defended against its devotees: a theory of historical performance in the 20th century’, The Musical Quarterly, lxix/3 (1983), pp.297–322, at p.299. This complaint was also voiced by Richard Taruskin, who laments the ‘complete neutrality’ to which most ‘authentic’ performances, apparently, aspire; see Text and act: essays on music and performance (New York, 1995), p.72. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Violin technique and the contrapuntal imagination in 17th-century German lands
JF - Early Music
DO - 10.1093/em/caab031
DA - 2021-07-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/violin-technique-and-the-contrapuntal-imagination-in-17th-century-51I80Vls9D
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -