ABSTRACT

The examination of cello performance techniques in the long nineteenth century has attempted to capture the ambiguities inherent in attempts to reconstruct older playing styles, and the interpretation of the research that supports this. Not only by considering aspects of posture, the physicality of bowing and fingering techniques, and changing attitudes to expression, but also by exploring how historical performance might incorporate cultural aspects of music. There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the historiography of nineteenth-century performance practices. Insofar as academic research into performance practices is central to the modem historically-informed performances of musical works, it has been predicated on a view of the musical work as primarily the composer's creation, shaped by the composer's sound-world and expectations of performance as experienced at the time. Historical performance thus becomes a matter of recovering these expectations and sound-worlds, by studying the available treatises and their contextualization, and using the appropriate instruments and associated technologies.