Baroque Music Today: Music As Speech : Ways to a New Understanding of Music

For performers and audiences to understand music of earlier times, they must learn to comprehend the languages and messages of the past. In these essays, Nikolaus Harnoncourt summarizes his views arising from years devoted to the performance of early music, discussing some of the problems of historical interpretation. His objective is to use our knowledge of historical performance practice to arrive at a modern interpretation of the masterworks of the past. In this way today's performer and listener may discover the full spectrum of what musical speech was intended to communicate.