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In July 2005 many of the leading scholars of classical music met in Sulzburg. Although the name 'Sulzburg', when used in connection with devotees of Mozart, looks like an obvious misprint, it is not. The town shares with Salzburg a history of salt mines ( Salz or Sulz) and picture-postcard images of rustic elegance in the Alpine piedmont, but it lies in the southwest corner of Germany. It offers a more contemplative environment - away from the tourist throngs in Mozart's city - and possesses at Bad Sulzburg the type of mineral springs that have long attracted travellers from afar. The workshop held at this spa was entitled 'Communicative Strategies in Music of the Late Eighteenth Century', and from that gathering ten of the participants were able to formalize their presentations for inclusion in this volume.
The focus of the book is clearly on music in late eighteenth-century Vienna. Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn are the central characters, with J. S. Bach and the nations of France, Italy and England playing minor roles or serving as scenery. Given the history of books such as these, which have their roots in Victorian demonstrations of the formal superiority of 'pure' German music over the shallow sensuousness of French and Italian music, one might have expected quite a dull collection of articles. Based on the experience of this reviewer, however, this is not the case at all. The articles are quite lively, very contemporary and representative of a wide range of viewpoints.
The two editors have each provided a short essay that serves as a prelude (Mirka) and a postlude (Agawu) to the volume. In between, they have grouped the ten articles into three broad areas: (1) Communication and the Market, (2) Musical Grammar and (3) Rhetorical Form and Topical Decorum. Although these topics are broad and probably after-the-fact, rather like the titles of sessions at large conferences, one does sense their appropriateness.
The editors are to be lauded for inviting a specialist in the theory of communication, Paul Cobley, to lead off with the first article. In music studies we often hear the work of such specialists filtered through the voices of their advocates within the tribe of academic musicians....