Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance

by John Butt

Why do we feel the need to perform music in a historically informed style? Is this need related to wider cultural concerns? In this challenging study, John Butt sums up recent debates on the nature of the early music movement, calling upon a seemingly inexhaustible fund of ideas gleaned from historical musicology, analytic philosophy, literary theory, historiography and theories of modernism and postmodernism. He develops the critical views of both supporters and detractors, claiming ultimately that it has more intellectual and artistic potential than its detractors may have assumed.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History

265 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 1998

About the author

John Butt is Gardiner Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow and musical director of Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he held the office of organ scholar at King’s College. Continuing as a graduate student working on the music of Bach he received his PhD in 1987. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and a Fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge, joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1989 as University Organist and Professor of Music.
In autumn 1997 he returned to Cambridge as a University Lecturer and Fellow of King’s College, and in October 2001 he took up his current post at Glasgow.