Abstract
In many respects, the challenges facing musical performers will differ depending on whether they are dealing with historic or contemporary repertoire. Such challenges become increasingly apparent when one form of performance practice involves the use of historical instruments, and the other contemporary music technologies. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why one might separate forms of practice, perhaps offering technical, aesthetic, practical, cultural and even metaphysical rationales as a diagnostic for the ostensible cleavage between many different forms of performance. In doing so, however, we potentially neglect a core challenge that binds musical performance, irrespective of style, genre, tradition or technology; in all cases, performance requires the performer to confront the prevailing attitudes, concerns, preoccupations and aesthetic tendencies common to the cultures from which their practices are drawn. In this respect, forms of performance practice are united, involving the painstaking assimilation of knowledge whether historic or contemporary. This paper presents personal accounts of both historically-informed performance practice and contemporary performance practice from two active performers. It has three central aims: 1) to survey the central processes and methods involved in the planning, preparation and delivery of each form of performance practice; 2) to consider the various similarities and differences that hold between those forms of practice; 3) illuminate the relations between the performance, as a seemingly autonomous event, and the broader cultural context that underpins every aspects of the performance itself. In doing so, the paper places those cultural contexts at the heart of the musical performance, before noting that even the contemporary will, as time passes, become the historic.