Are you a Harpist with Historical Leanings?

We've been advised of an interesting conference run by the Historical Harp Society of Ireland on 15-21 August in Kilkenny.

More information:

SCOIL na gCLÁIRSEACH -Festival of Early Irish Harp 2018

The Society is now taking bookings for the 2018 Scoil na gClairseach—Festival of Early Irish Harp, 15–21 August 2018 at Coláiste Pobail Osraí in the medieval city of Kilkenny, Ireland.

Book before 15 May 2018 for an Early Bird discount of €25 on the week rate and / or sign up with a friend who is new to the festival and you will each get a Bring a Friend discount of €25 on the week rate.

Players: Join for the complete festival programme, from 8.45 a.m. to 6.45 p.m. each day.
Listeners: Join for part – or all – of any day to listen in on Players' sessions, workshops, lectures, masterclasses and concerts.
Field trippers: Join for a day in Dublin, inspecting historic harps close-up, guided by world experts, on Tues. 21 August.

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What's it all about? Informational video HERE
Read about the 2017 festival HERE and see the 2017 timetable HERE
Booking information HERE

Email: info@irishharp.org Call: +353 (0)86 8623430 

Garcia - New Treatise on the Art of Singing, 1857 (Historically Informed Performance)

Another useful tome for students of historically-informed performance, we found Garcia's New Treatise on the Art of Singing freely available on Archive.org - what a happy find!

Read it here, and yes, it's also on the RCS Library Music portal!

Joaquim Quantz - On Playing Flute (Historically Informed Performance)

What could be nicer than finding what you want is available free online?  So, here's another for our historically informed performance students. You may not be able to read the whole of Quantz's flute treatise in English online, but you can read Chapter 13, on ornamentation.  

It must be a good source, if it's also picked up by the blog, Technology for the Classical Singer!

And yes, we've saved the link on our RCS Library portal too.

Dorottya Fabian - A Musicology of Performance: Theory and Method based on Bach's Solos for Violin

Maybe not yet ready for Bach Partitas!

Checking through reading lists, we found another useful book that isn't actually on the historical performance list, but might still be of interest.  It's a free e-book through Open Book Publishers.  If you're a violinist, you'll probably find this fascinating. Read it here!

Don't worry, we've also saved it to our library portal pages for musicians, so that's another way of finding it.  

Historically Informed Music Performance

If you can't find the right books in the library catalogue, how do you improve your chances?

Try these special Whittaker Library searches:-

• Music Interpretation
• Music Performance Practice

Sometimes you're just using terms that are so specific, so narrow, that you're actually reducing your chances of finding books on that subject.  Eg, unless a book has the words, 'historically informed' in its title or somewhere in the book description, then the search engine won't be able to retrieve them. So by changing the terms you're looking for, or making them just a bit more general, you improve your chances.

Don't forget the categories down the side of the page, enabling you to choose a format (book, drama book, music book, audio-visual, etc) or a range of subject headings that have been attached to the items retrieved.  Clicking on one of these subject-headings works the same as Amazon's "If you like this, then you may also like ..." suggestions.

We've got the knowledge - just come and ask!