Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle’s treatise La tonotechnie, ou l’art de noter les cylindres (1775) claimed that automated instruments driven by pinned cylinders would grant listeners direct access to music as the composer conceived it. Standard notation was insufficient, as it did not capture the music’s mouvement – its temporal flexibi…[Read more]

It is well known that the instrumentation of eighteenth-century chamber music was highly flexible; composers
frequently adapted their own works for a variety of instruments, and players often used whatever combinations
they had available. One type of arrangement little used today but attested to in both verbal description
and musical…[Read more]