Reactions to the Record: Perspectives on Historical Performance

Stanford University has a fascinating symposium coming up; I'll just quote from their Web site:

The Stanford Department of Music is hosting a three-day symposium to explore the vivid styles of performance heard on the earliest acoustic recordings and player piano rolls, styles that began to vanish with the First World War and were considered almost scandalous after the Second. This will be a forum for experiment and dialogue, and the focus will be practical: what might these traces of vintage styles mean to performers, composers and listeners today?

The symposium will be held from April 19 to April 21 at Stanford, in Palo Alto, CA. The cost is a quite reasonable $120 for non-students ($90 if you paid before February 15...). Presenters include Will Crutchfield, Malcolm Bilson, Robert Philip, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet.

The schedule is juicy. I wish there were some heavyweights from the record-collecting world on the program, and sadly no women are among the presenters other than Lesley Robertson, violist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. (Okay. I admit that what I'm thinking is more strongly worded than "sadly." It's 2007, for crying out loud. I understand there may have been scheduling issues and that women may have been invited to present, but...it doesn't look so good.)

I plan to be there and expect to blog extensively about the symposium.