For performers of Early Music, there is an everlasting quest to unveil new perspectives on a historically distant repertoire in search of new ways of performing and understanding the music. This is true for all performers of Early Music, including Baroque guitarists. A currently very popular performance piece is Francesco Corbetta’s ‘Caprice de chaconne’ (1671, ff. 72–73), which is to be found in his 1671 Baroque guitar tablature-collection, La guitarre royalle. Displaying advanced technical performance skills, embroidered connections between temporal coordinates that border between fantasy and order, it serves as an excellent display, not only of the performer’s technical skills, but also of Corbetta’s virtuosity both as a performer and composer, and, as we will see, political participation. In this article I will suggest new perspectives that may provide an extended understanding of how Corbetta’s political wit and musical talent manifest themselves in his ‘Caprice de chaconne.’ By unveiling symmetrical and proportional aspects to this music, I will present a structure that might have an influence on the performance of the piece, situating it within the socio-political context of Louis XIV’s court and the cult of his Sun King persona.

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Recent world developments have put a strain on the humanities in general, and higher education music performance study degree-programmes in particular. In an educational system currently promoting consumer-product relationships where the music performance teacher is very much accountable for the students’ development into professional musicians and, recently, also sustainable world citizens, we must give more attention to what, whom and why we educate? This chapter is an armchair analytical philosophical continuation of a paper published elsewhere (Rolfhamre, 2020). Taking the lead from Julia Annas’ (2011) virtue-as-skill, I will, here, elaborate on what implications the Norwegian state higher education funding system may have on the higher education music performance teacher’s perceived mandate from the perspectives of music pedagogy, rhetoric and virtue ethics. First, I pursue three different usages of the verb “to buy” to exemplify why I find the chapter’s title to be relevant and valid. This sets the premises for the following turn to rhetoric to highlight the starting point’s persuasive functions and incentives. Subsequently, I briefly relate the argument to Butlerian performativity to emphasise its relation to normativity, inclusion-exclusion and the theoretical possibility of “breaking free”. From this position, I draw on Aristotelian phronesis, mainly through the position held by Hansen (2007) to sketch up an ecology in which I ask how this all affects the teacher’s mandate?

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Increasing history consumption in today’s society creates, in different social formations, a common expectation of what historical music is, can and should be. In this chapter, we draw on music education and Baradian agential realism perspectives to offer what we perceive as a promising procedure for studying early music performance from a less anthropocentric stand. We ask: How does early music performance intra-act with YouTube as medium, and how does this intra-action enable informal learning? We first address the significance and prevailing interpretation of rhetoric in this context, and what a move from a single-case rhetoric to an ecological one offers. Subsequently, we introduce agential realism as an approach to studying early music performance, particularly through the lense of Barad (2007). Here, we offer a discursive practice that can contribute to future studies, which we follow up with an exemplary case study. The case is later discussed and analysed, and in conclusion we draw attention to the online media’s role both in sustaining historical culture for new generations, and in cumulatively reinventing itself as a pedagogical process both within and outside educational settings.