There is a tension in this impressive book between two kinds of musicology. In large stretches, Stephanie D. Vial's exploration of the practices and notation of punctuation in eighteenth-century music combines an elegantly collected set of historical texts with the evaluation of their application to real problems in musical performance. But by considering what we used to call ‘purely musical’ problems in wider philosophical and cultural contexts, the author also raises a number of important and fascinating questions of relevance to more than just performers with an interest in historical approaches. As I worked my way through this work, I found myself asking if the two approaches can coexist happily between the covers of one book.

Vial's exploration of musical punctuation, which she defines widely to include rests, articulations, phrasings and those myriad suggestions about inflection and timing, unnotated yet implied, found so often in eighteenth-century music, is first and foremost ‘performing practice’ (or ‘performance practice’) research. This kind of musicology is fraught with the danger of descending into the kind of scholastic argument-mongering favoured, for instance, by the late Frederick Neumann and his many hapless opponents. Neumann depended on the academic's ability to cow unruly performers – his main intended audience – into submission with ‘logical’ argument and relentless citation of authority. As a postgraduate student at Cornell, an institution Vial had attended a few years earlier, I can remember the sinking feeling I felt when I was invited to summarize to an undergraduate conducting class Neumann's perfectly argued contention, supported by hundreds of pounds (or so it seemed) of contemporary treatises, that the practice of ‘double-dotting’ was completely unknown in the eighteenth century. Does that mean, my audience asked, that they are ‘not allowed’ to double dot? Apparently, we are not. In contrast, Vial, whose citation of authority is extraordinarily broad, wears her erudition lightly, grinds no axes and avoids this ‘authority trap’ – Richard Taruskin called it the ‘Papa Doc’ syndrome – almost all of the time.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first (‘Establishing an Historical Perspective’) she examines the various premises at the heart of her project: that there is a viable analogy between musical and non-musical punctuation, and that this analogy had a signal role to play in eighteenth-century thinking about performance and composition. In a second part (‘The Art of Interpreting Rests’) she devotes three chapters to teasing out the meaning of written and unwritten points of repose and silence, illuminating a wide-ranging series of music examples – including more than a few familiar works by composers like Bach and Mozart – with reading after reading from the (not just) eighteenth-century literature on musical punctuation. The opportunity Vial affords us to reread – and rehear – familiar music in the light of these writings is one of the pleasures of this book, and is a testament to what must have been years of careful collection and disciplined collation of documentary evidence.

Vial concludes with a closer look at two ‘Case Studies in Musical Performance’. The first is a treatment of Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg's essay on the punctuation of recitative from his Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (1759–1764), which up until now has not been available in English; Vial provides a complete translation in an appendix. The second examines Johann Mattheson's slightly earlier ‘punctuation’ of a minuet from his Kern melodischer Wißenschafft of 1737. This final section of the book is not as strong as the first two. Vial discusses Marpurg's and Mattheson's writings in the context of a chorus of widely diverse thinkers, mostly German, from Muffat to Riepel to Koch. These writers seem too much here to be singing from the same page, when in fact the gulf dividing, for instance, the South German, Roman Catholic and earlier Riepel from the North German, Protestant and much later Koch is immense. Given the growing recent secondary literature (mostly in German) on music-writing in the eighteenth century (see, for instance, the outstanding articles on Mattheson and Marpurg in the new Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart), it seems to me that a more differentiated approach could be possible: who can say how well Muffat and Forkel would have been able to dance a minuet together? Vial's partly Neumannesque approach, in which treatises are pressed into service as wallpaper for a stream of suggestions about performance – Papa Doc raises his ugly head – makes this line of criticism inevitable. Finally, her discussion of writings about musical punctuation should surely be read together with a growing body of writings by scholars like Danuta Mirka, who has just published an important book on theories of rhythm in the eighteenth century, Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

The Art of Musical Phrasing is more than just a book about performance practice. Vial also paints in broad strokes, particularly in the early sections of the book. Her examination, for instance, of the role of the expansion of print in changing general attitudes to punctuation (38–40), and the eighteenth-century public's fascination with command of punctuation as a marker of cultivation – a prerequisite for social mobility – is especially intriguing. Better still, the educated eighteenth-century woman's perspective on punctuation, posture and conversation makes a thought-provoking appearance (55–56).

Unfortunately, this strand is not sustained throughout the book. I would have wished to read more passages like this:

The delicate web of connections Vial draws in this section of the book between the eighteenth century's lively interest in punctuation in general, musical punctuation specifically, the expansion of print media and the rise of the galant attitude, especially in the female-dominated world of the salon, is a real scholarly coup, even if the deficit of research into the world of the salon she laments in a footnote has since been substantially rectified by Wiebke Thormählen's PhD dissertation ‘Art, Education and Entertainment: The String Quintet in Late Eighteenth-Century Vienna’ (Cornell University, 2008). Nonetheless, this fascinating passage left me hopeful that Vial would return to this strand of her work – in which the intellectual stakes are so high – more often in the book. Alas, she does not.

Vial's book, then, is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. I'm not sure this is her fault. Her publisher, the University of Rochester Press (which has, incidentally, produced a book that is elegant, well indexed and easy to read) seems to have presumed two audiences. One – performance practice scholars and, more importantly, musicians – are presented with an encyclopedic compendium of information about the musical practices of punctuation. The other, more ‘critical’ academic public, is treated to but a taste, unfortunately, of how it would be possible to write powerfully about the central role of the practice of musical punctuation in eighteenth-century discourses of gender, identity formation and social power. While Stephanie Vial has written an important book about the practices of musical punctuation in the eighteenth century, she owes us at least a second one, building on the promise of the first, about what these practices mean.