Peter Hedrick '61MM publishes An Early Hautboy Solo Matrix: Solos for the Hautboy before 1710

Peter Hedrick '61MM has published a new book, An Early Hautboy Solo Matrix: Solos for the Hautboy before 1710 based on a Symphonia/Sonate by Johann Christoph Pez that Demonstrates a Performance Practice of Adaptation (Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, UK, 2015). The book deals with a significant yet hitherto unexamined topic, filling an important gap in the area of historical performance practice.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing notes:

The earliest surviving hautboy solo is a Symphonia by Johann Christoph Pez from the 1690s or early 1700s. This piece survives in two versions, as a Sonata for violin and a Symphonia for hautboy, and the differences between the two enable a comparison of how Pez viewed the character and technical capabilities of each instrument.

The purpose of this edition is to show how Pez’s Symphonia can be used as a template to find other works that might become hautboy solos (treble/bass) from the last third or so of the seventeenth century when the instrument came into use. Thus Pez points the way to a seventeenth-century practice that the author demonstrates in four contemporary pieces by writing out examples of what would have been performed at sight or from memory. Adaptations like this of J. S. Bach’s keyboard works are being performed by some of today’s leading lutenists.

This book will make a significant addition to academic libraries and will be of interest to scholars of historical performance practice and to performers of the (baroque) hautboy, the oboe and other wind instruments. It breaks new ground in the same spirit as studies that have offered reconstructions of works with lacunae in scoring or with damaged pages.

Peter Hedrick, an oboist, had a long teaching career at Michigan State University and Ithaca College. Before his retirement in 2009, he and his wife Libby founded and ran NYS Baroque, a period instrument orchestra based in upstate New York.