Exploring plurality of interpretation through annotations in the long 19th century: musician's perspectives and the FAAM project.

Nicholas Cornia

About this exposition

The quest of reconciling scholarship and interpretative freedom has always been present in the early music movement discourse, since its 19th century foundations. Confronted with a plurality of performance practices, the performer of Early Music is forced to make interpretative choices, based on musicological research of the sources and their personal taste. The critical analysis of the sources related to a musical work is often a time-consuming and cumbersome task, usually provided by critical editions made by musicologists. Such editions primarily focus on the composer's agency, neglecting the contribution of a complex network of professions, ranging from editors, conductors, amateur and professional performers and collectors. The FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is an interdisciplinary project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp that wishes to explore the possibilities of annotation analysis on music scores for historically informed musicians. Annotations are a valuable source of information to recollect the decision-making process of musicians of the past. Especially when original musical recordings are not available, the marks provided by these performers of the past are the most intimate and informative connections between modern and ancient musicians. Contrary to a purely scholarly historically informed practice approach, based on the controversial concept of authenticity, we wish to allow the modern performers to reconcile their practice with the one of their predecessors in a process of dialectic emulation, where artistic process is improved through the past but does not stagnate in it.

type	research exposition
keywords	historically informed performance, historical knowledge, agency, source critique, early music performance, editions, 19th century, 20th century, aesthetics, performance, Choice, dialogue, freedom
date	27/11/2023
published	04/12/2024
last modified	04/12/2024
status	published
affiliation	Royal Conservatoire Antwerp
copyright	Nicholas Cornia, 2023
license	CC BY
language	English
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2406928/2406927
doi	https://doi.org/10.22501/rc.2406928
published in	Research Catalogue
external link	https://www.ap-arts.be/en/research/faam-flemish-archive-annotated-music

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Exploring plurality of interpretation through annotations in the long 19th century: musician's perspectives and the FAAM project. (2024)