Performing Music History : Musicians Speak First-Hand about Music History and Performance

Performing Music History offers a unique perspective on music history and performance through a series of conversations with women and men intimately associated with music performance, history, and practice: the musicians themselves. Fifty-five celebrated artists―singers, pianists, violinists, cellists, flutists, horn players, oboists, composers, conductors, and jazz greats―provide interviews that encompass most of Western music history, from the Middle Ages to contemporary classical music, avant-garde innovations, and Broadway musicals.

The book covers music history through lenses that include “authentic” performance, original instrumentation, and social context. Moreover, the musicians interviewed all bring to bear upon their respective subjects three outstanding qualities: 1) their high esteem in the music world as immediately recognizable names among musicians and public alike; 2) their energy and devotion to scholarship and the recovery of endangered musical heritages; and 3) their considerable skills, media savvy, and showmanship as communicators. Introductory essays to each chapter provide brief synopses of historical eras and topics. Combining careful scholarship and lively conversation, Performing Music History explores historical contexts for a host of fascinating issues.

John C. Tibbetts is Associate Professor of Film and Media at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author of The Gothic Imagination, Composers in the Movies, Schumann: A Chorus of Voices, Dvořák in America, and The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film.

Michael Saffle is Professor of Music and Humanities at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA. His eight books include The Music of Franz Liszt: Stylistic Development and Cultural Synthesis (2018), and he also writes about music in film and on television.

William A. Everett is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical and author of Music for the People: A History of the Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra, 1933-1982.