TO what extent can the performance intentions of long-dead composers be reliably known, and how integral to their compositions might such intentions have been? The experience of planning and directing musical performances has never ceased to confront me with awkward musical questions of this kind, from my earliest efforts (as a first-year undergraduate in 1967) to my present work. And, since vocal music was central to most earlier periods of music-making, it is natural that many of those difficult questions should concern vocal practices. Do we even fully understand what a ‘choir’ might have been? Has falsetto singing really been around since the Middle Ages, and what exactly was the French haute-contre? What does high-clef notation imply, not least in the case of Monteverdi's 1610 Magnificat (a7)? Were Purcell's countertenors ‘countertenors’ in today's sense? If much of Bach's choral writing was designed for one voice per part, how was this supposed to work in practice? Complex issues of this nature, issues directly affecting perceptions of music we may think we know well, form the common thread running through these collected essays.

For the most part my researches have been driven by a performer's simple aspiration: to understand as fully as possible how composers of the more distant past intended their written works to function in performance. The intimate workings of those contemporary performances are, of course, lost for all time. Of certain underlying principles, however, there is plenty to be learned: not so much matters of style – the often barely definable characteristics of musical delivery – but rather those fundamental pre-performance factors that determine not only a composition's intended medium (the performing body) but also the multifarious conventions by which that composition is tacitly expected to operate.