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History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music.

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History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music. By Peter Walls. Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2003. [xiv, 184 p. ISBN 1-84383-005-1. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Until twenty or so years ago, many traditional performers and musicologists viewed performance practice (a.k.a. Historically Informed Performance or HIP) with suspicion, despite its official designation as one of musicology's subspecialties. Recently the gap between the two camps has begun to narrow, partly due to the realization that the "authenticity police" do not represent mainstream HIPsters, but also in some measure as a result of recent works by well respected scholars and performers who address specific performance practice issues in a balanced and thoughtful manner. Among the most notable of these practical sources are Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell's introduction to The Historical Performance of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Performance Practice (for music before and after 1600), edited by Howard Mayer Brown and Stanley Sadie (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), and the Early Music America series of performance practice guides for Medieval, Renaissance, and Seventeenth-century Music edited respectively by Ross Duffin (A Performer's Guide to Medieval Music [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000]), Jeffery Kite-Powell (A Performer's Guide to Renaissance Music [New York: Schirmer, 1994]), and Stewart Carter (A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music [New York: Schirmer, 1997]), the last two with revised editions in preparation. To this list should be added Clive Brown's Classical and Romantic Performing Practice from 1750-1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Several other books treat the broader philosophical controversies that performance practice seems to excite. These include Nicholas Kenyon, et. al.'s Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Richard Taruskin's Text and Act (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Paul Henry Lang's Performance and Musicology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), and Peter Kivy's Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical...

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