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Summary Of Changing Issues Of Performance Practice

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George B. Stauffer`s article, “Changing Issues of Performance Practice (1997)”, asserts that performing the works of Johann Sebastian Bach in the Baroque way is considered only developed in the past 50 years. Stauffer describes typical features of performance practice by using examples from different eras to support the idea that actually the methods musicians used to play Bach`s pieces have changed frequently through eras.

The Baroque era is a crucial period about stylistic self-consciousness which affected the modes of performance. Bach changed the rhythms purposely when presenting in order to create national styles to fit different occasions. Performing and understanding foreign styles is a skill which was required. However, the strange …show more content…

However, works like Bachbewegung and Bach-Gesamtausgabe were created by comparing early manuscript sources. Although its academic standards may seem not so even by now, it was a significant effort in that period when musicians paid too much attentions on subjectiveness. Heinrich Bitter and Philipp Spitta were two biographies of Bach who made efforts to show Bach`s real music. Their documents presented how Bach thought an appropriate force needed in church music. Especially Spitta, he presented how Bach set the instruments and ensembles in his pieces and also discussed the evidences of performance practice from the Bach`s original manuscripts and the forgotten printed scores from seventeenth and eighteenth …show more content…

Firstly, the organ. Most of the existing original instruments were poorly restored, and the newly-build organs were normally with voice or action problems. In time, some firms stared to build organs by applying Baroque principles. Also by1970s, a variety of reproductions of seventeenth and eighteenth century German organ were built. At the end of the twentieth century, a Baroque style organ or a reproductions was considered ideal instrument to play Bach`s organ music. About the harpsichord. At first, the single-handed harpsichord was only built to Landowska`s own specifications. However, the performance inspired people`s interest to play Bach`s music by harpsichord, and also encouraged some instrument makers to to rebuild reproductions. By the 1970, Bach`s keyboard music was performed more and more like it was conceived. The evolution was similar for the string, woodwind and brass instruments to return to the original models, from reconstructed instruments to better

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