Performance, history, and aesthetics: a call for reviews.(Editorial)

Musical scholarship has its roots in performance. Our discipline originated in the quest to decipher older notational systems and to correct errors in printed editions; while we often study the printed text, the creation of new sounding texts was the initial goal. The desire to model nineteenth-century musicology on philology gradually led the discipline to a more text-based focus, but scholarly research has continued to affect performance. The "historically informed" performance movement and the field of performance practice demonstrate that research with written texts can change the way we hear the music.

The converse, however, has not always been true. The judgment of performance became an expected part of the concert review in the mid-nineteenth century. Journalism was initially considered an impartial science (like musicology), as reflected in the names of newspapers like The Observer or The Spectator. The belief in objectivity passed quickly in music journalism, and musicologists sought to distinguish their craft from …