AHRC

Cardiff UniversityCardiff Centre for Research in Historically Informed Performance Leeds University Centre for Historically Informed Performance University of Leeds

 

CHASE

Collection of Historical Annotated String Editions

There is a new CHASE website in preparation, to which you will be redirected when it is ready. Files that are missing here will be on the new site, but that will not be fully functioning for some time, so please bear with us! If you would like to access specific files, email me ( George Kennaway) and I'll try to help.

Our project aims to hunt out, collect, digitise, and contextualize the extensive, but scattered corpus of nineteenth and early twentieth-century editions of string music, annotated by performers of the period with bowings, fingerings, expression markings, or explanatory comments. When complete, this project will provide scholars and performers with an invaluable resource for understanding the performing practices of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only will they have access to the full texts of these editions, but also to an on-line cataloguewith links to information about editors, publishers, and extracts from treatises. This material will lead to new understanding of the meaning of performance markings in music of the period, and to a new assessment of the status of the written musical text in relation to its execution. It will provide a guide to the manner of its performance at the time, and thus offer a stimulus to modern performers who wish to explore this sound-world.

NEWS AND ACTIVITIES
RESEARCH AREA
(At the moment this is password-protected, but if you would like access, email George Kennaway).

The aims of this project include the creation of a database of 19th-century performing editions of string chamber music. The group is led by Prof. Clive Brown (Leeds), with Prof. Robin Stowell (Cardiff) as co-investigator. Duncan Druce is research fellow, Dr. George Kennaway (Leeds) is the team’s research assistant, and Peter Collyer (Leeds) is pursuing Ph.D. research into Leipzig music publishing in the 19th-century.

This project will have several important outcomes:

  • a catalogue raisonné in the form of a comprehensive web-based database (with print version)
  • two international conferences
  • a published book and research papers
  • public performances

Many performing editions produced long after the original works were composed and published have been largely ignored as sources for the study of performance practices, even though such editions were compiled mostly by the leading instrumentalists of the time, and in many cases were relied on well into the twentieth century. They can, therefore, act as snapshots of the transmission of ideas about performance over a long historical period. They also provide considerable empirical evidence with which to approach questions of pedagogical transmission, or the wider and equally vexed question of ‘schools’ of playing.
The on-line catalogue will comprise a fully searchable archive of scanned copies of sheet music, linked to explanatory text from such sources as instrumental tutors, and sound and/or video files where appropriate. This will enable scholars to examine the work of individual editor-performers, compare editions by publisher, or compare the more important variants between texts, and will also provide a large body of information regarding publishers’ plate numbers and their dating. This database will also be a significant resource for performers, teachers and students, who will be able to see at a glance the different performing approaches applied to their repertoire over a considerable period of time.

An expanded version of this project description can be found in:
George Kennaway, "Researching 19th-century performing editions: Leeds University’s AHRC Project",
Early Music Performer 24 (2009).

If you would like to know more about any aspect of the CHASE project, please contact George Kennaway, School of Music, University of Leeds (tel. +44/0 113 3438218).

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