Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the frenchpianomusic.com website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

Scott McCarrey is Professor of Piano at Brigham Young University-Hawai’i. His doctorate at York University, UK, was focused on the performance and analysis of Ravel, an interest which led him to co-organize, along with Lesley A. Wright and Roy Howat, the 2007 conference entitled ’French Music: Performance and Analysis’. Lesley A. Wright is a Professor of Musicology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Throughout her career she has focused on Bizet, Massenet and their contemporaries, French opera, the Parisian press, and the institutions that supported the careers of French musicians.