Performing baroque music

Mary Cyr's Performing Baroque Music is unique as a practical guide devoted in its entirety to the most important issues of baroque performance practice. Listeners, performers, students, and instructors will find here, carefully explained and thoroughly documented, the analytical tools they need to understand and interpret musical evidence from the baroque era. Cyr, an acclaimed baroque musician as well as a noted scholar, considers "both the boundaries and the freedom that were inherent in baroque performing techniques." Chapter 1 introduces the field of performance practice and its goals, the limits of "authenticity," and the characteristics of baroque sound. Chapters 2 through 8 explore issues critical to the performance of baroque music: tempo, dynamics, pitch and temperament, the basso continuo, articulation, rhythm and notational conventions, and appropriate ornamentation. Readers will find new material on continuo playing, as well as extensive treatment of singing and French music . Scores for eleven works, many reproduced in facsimile to illustrate the conventions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notation, are included for close study. These works are also available on