Still, I concede that 18th-century sources are limited. They can't actually play for us; their musical advice must be approximate, mediated by language. Furthermore, each treatise represents its author's viewpoint, but that author is rarely a composer we care about. We may read, say, Geminiani and Türk; instruments in hand, however, who wouldn't rather play Corelli or Beethoven? And one often wonders whether Leopold Mozart's theoretical advice really applies to his son's mature compositions, or whether, by the late 1770s, a surname was the only thing Wolfgang and his father had in common.
In many cases, treatise-reading encourages generalization, while performing should really be about specificity. Unless we devote unrealistic amounts of time to reading an unrealistic number of treatises, we risk overburdening a few authors. Thus, Geminiani becomes a go-to source for all Italian music; likewise, so many French performances ape Muffat.
(As an aside: the widespread Muffat-infatuation has always puzzled me. Look at the dates: he went to France briefly in his late teens, and didn't write the treatise until decades later. Is his evidence reliable? I wonder, too, why nobody seems interested in his German bowings. They could be applied to Bach and Telemann, who, despite vaguely-Francophone interests, were writing German music, in Germany, to be performed by German musicians and consumed by German audiences.)
Having now made a meal of the appetizer, I hasten to my main point: Rejoice! Treatises aren't our only option! We can steal the occasional glimpse into past practices by searching for clues within the notation. Of course, most notation is neutral, and we need treatises to help unravel "what" (if anything) it "means". But, sometimes, a composer leaves a clue.
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Copyright restrictions prevent me from posting from the NMA, but see here for an urtext original. Amazingly enough, all editions on IMSLP show incorrect grace-notes! (In our age of increasing IMSLP-reliance, it's a reminder not to believe everything posted there.) |
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