We all know what early music is supposed to sound like – or at least we have good reasons to think we do. The modern performance tradition has established a remarkably resilient sonic imaginary that can be indexed as easily as by calling to mind a hooded monk bathed in ethereal light or one of Botticelli’s beflowered maidens. Chapter 16 connects performance instructions from a little-known musical edition of the 1840s with prevailing performance norms today, arguing that we moderns have tended to conceal the musical poetics described in this book by neglecting documentary evidence about tempo, acoustics, timbre, and the somewhat slipperier “intensity.” However scary, resetting our esthetic compasses and engaging more empathetically with the past can have the side benefit of making our present-day sounds more inviting and more inclusive. The book concludes by offering a path out of elitism, anachronism, and inhibition and toward full-blooded engagement.

Up until about 1480 most French songs were cast in one of three fixed poetic and musical forms: the rondeau, virelai, and ballade. Chapter 10 presents new ideas about how each repetition scheme conditions how the music happens in time, taking further an analysis by Christopher Page about the dynamics of the rondeau while offering a fresh interpretation of the virelai’s experiential horizons.

Analysis of addressee and writer–recipient relationships is a common methodology for the interpretation of written correspondence of ‘great’ composers. By contrast, when a musical text is the object of study, music philologists and performers alike tend to neglect such a contextual perspective when attempting to reveal its meaning – as if composers had no particular audience in mind when they wrote their piano music. This chapter attempts a characterisation of Schubert’s pianistic audience in Vienna as reflected in contemporary Viennese pianoforte treatises. The first part presents evidence to support such a geographically focused source selection – the distinctly nationalist stance of the Viennese pianoforte scene in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna. The second part compiles a brief genre history of the Viennese pianoforte treatise – both produced in Vienna and imported from abroad – during Schubert’s lifetime. The third part deduces several common principles from this fascinating corpus of sources and reads selected passages from Schubert’s works through this lens, exemplifying how some of the traditional ‘problems’ can be resolved in the context of early nineteenth-century Viennese pianism.

Chapter 3 focuses on the implications of the refrain for performance, reappraising its role as a marker of responsorial song. The chapter argues that the refrain in devotional Latin song brought individuals and communities together in the moment of performance through the acts of remembering together, responding collectively, and worshipping communally. Drawing on the rhetoric, grammar, form, and musical texture of Latin refrain songs, this Chapter illustrates how poets and composers embedded ideas about performance, community, and communal participation in their compositions. Crucially, the songs themselves define communities rooted in the structures of the church; singers and songs belong to nested and hierarchical communities of clergy, choir, and laypeople, the power relations of which are determined in some cases by rank and in others by age. The efforts of the scribes and compilers who worked within these communities contribute additional layers of information to the meaning and performance of refrains, with rubrication and textual cues offering rare insight into specific contexts for the refrain song’s responsorial performance. Chapter 3 also suggests a relationship between the refrain song’s implicit choreographic identity and the discourses of community conveyed by the refrain.

At Clara Schumann’s concerts, Robert Schumann’s sets of piano character pieces met audiences only through her own reshaping and recontextualization. She extracted pieces from some sets for ‘mosaics’ of two or more pieces, potentially from different opuses and by different composers. In other cases, she performed piano sets in abridged or reordered versions. This chapter closely considers several of Schumann’s mosaics, as well as her several versions of Kreisleriana. It argues that Schumann’s reworkings of her husband’s piano sets were acts of compositional agency that reflected her own strategies. In her mosaics, she juxtaposed pieces to create new textural, tonal, motivic or stylistic interrelationships and, in her abridged versions of sets, changed their larger structures in both radical and subtle ways.

Examining this aspect of Clara Schumann’s performances can nuance how we understand her image as her husband’s pianistic champion, reminding us that she cultivated this image while participating in practices that allowed performers to customize works. More broadly, it invites us to recognize a musical work as a building block for a concert, and to recognize that performers’ decisions shape how features seemingly fixed within the score can take on varying significances within this larger context.

This chapter seeks to address the basic question that poses itself to any listener: how can two performances of a given piece of Renaissance polyphony sound radically different and unlike. It reviews the reasons for this impression: what the sources and notation tell us (and what they don’t) regarding performance forces, treatment of pitch, tempi, proportions, and performance conditions and contexts.The chapter also offers an overview of the changes of fashion and practice since the onset of sound recordings of Renaissance music. Crucial to the question is the way in which our assumptions and biases inform our interpretation of this information (and other sources of knowledge on performance practice), just as they did those of previous generations. As in the rest of this book, I seek here to define the relationship between (and readers’ awareness of) the twin claims of knowledge and interpretation, the tension between which plays itself out in concrete terms in the domain of performance practice.