A SHORT HISTORY OF LEEDS-BASED ROMANTIC PERFORMANCE RESEARCH, C. 2000 TO C. 2016

Few would deny the enormous impact on historical performing practices made by Clive Brown. His rigorous investigations and guidance have benefitted a number of scholars including me and others of his former doctoral students – notably Neal Peres Da Costa and George Kennaway – who, in turn, have taught a further generation of scholars and performers. It is apt to consider heritage and legacy here, even in this relatively new discipline.

It is thus perhaps not an overstatement to hold that there is, for want of a better description, a ‘Leeds School’ of historical performing practice. The geographical prefix encapsulates the fact that the main flourishing of Brown’s work coincided with his time as Professor of Applied Musicology at the University of Leeds. Accordingly, a team of scholars with Brown at the helm worked at Leeds on the basis of the following syllogism:

This might well be parsed as a traditional, positivist approach to constructivist learning. Scholarly activity creates knowledge via the amassing of data, and understanding of data is an act of elucidation and interpretation. Performance itself is thus both ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and it is logical that ‘historically informed’ performance based thoroughly upon this knowledge and understanding is considered pre-eminent. Hypotheses for performance are constructed based upon surviving evidence and are accordingly tested and re-evaluated in the light of new evidence. The path of scholarly research is thus to compile as much historical knowledge as possible, and the goal of interpretative scholars and performers is to adjust their hypotheses and performances accordingly.