Baroque Music Workshop with Hans Huyssen

Saturday, 11 February 2012 - 16.30h

These days, the vast majority of performers assume that their main responsibility is to perform as accurately as possible what is on the printed page. However, only a part of what constitutes a piece of music can be conveyed by notation. Certain parameters cannot be specified, such as how loud is loud, how fast is fast, or how should one balance a chord. 

If this is still the case today, before 1800 the gap between notation and realization was even greater, and the performer could sometimes be almost the equal of the composer in realizing a musical idea. Of course, often a performer and a composer were the same and thus felt free to alter music in performance. In the 17th and 18th centuries a musical text was just a starting point. Every performer was expected to add ornaments and embellishments. Continuo players, for example, usually did not have their parts written out. They worked from a bass line with figures above or below indicating the harmony. From this the performer was expected to produce a coherent part, choosing for himself how to space chords, whether to spread them or whether to add additional ornaments. Hans Huyssen will take a closer look at the intriguing chemistry between the text, stylistic conventions and the performer’s imagination.