This book investigates the ways large-scale music was directed or conducted in Britain before
baton conducting took hold in the 1830s. After surveying practice in Italy Germany and France
from Antiquity to the eighteenth century the focus is on direction in two strands of music
making in Stuart and Georgian Britain: choral music from Restoration cathedrals to the oratorio
tradition deriving from Handel and music in the theatre from the Jacobean masque to
nineteenth-century opera ending with an account of how modern baton conducting spread in the
1830s from the pit of the Haymarket Theatre to the Philharmonic Society and to large-scale
choral music. Part social and musical history based on new research into surviving performing
material documentary sources and visual evidence and part polemic intended to question the
use of modern baton conducting in pre-nineteenth-century music Before the Baton I> throws new
light on many hitherto dark areas though the heart of the book is an extended discussion of
the evidence relating to Handel's operas oratorios and choral music. Contrary to
near-universal modern practice he mostlypreferred to play rather than beat time. PETER HOLMAN
is Emeritus Professor of Historical Musicology at Leeds University. When not occupied with
writing and research he organises performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music
mostly directing them from the keyboard. He is director of The Parley of Instruments Leeds
Baroque the Suffolk Villages Festival and the annual Baroque Summer School run by Cambridge
Early Music.
