Complex hand dexterity is fundamental to our interactions with the physical, social, and cultural environment. Dexterity can be an expression of creativity and precision in a range of activities, including musical performance. Little is understood about complex hand dexterity or how virtuoso expertise is acquired, due to the versatility of movement combinations available to complete any given task. This has historically limited progress of the field because of difficulties in measuring movements of the hand. Recent developments in methods of motion capture and analysis mean it is now possible to explore the intricate movements of the hand and fingers. These methods allow us insights into the neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning complex hand dexterity and motor learning. They also allow investigation into the key factors that contribute to injury, recovery and functional compensation. The application of such analytical techniques within musical performance provides a multidisciplinary framework for purposeful investigation into the process of learning and skill acquisition in instrumental performance. These highly skilled manual and cognitive tasks present the ultimate achievement in complex hand dexterity. This paper will review methods of assessing instrumental performance in music, focusing specifically on biomechanical measurement and the associated technical challenges faced when measuring highly dexterous activities.

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Early in Wilhelm Heinse’s eccentric novel Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796) his characters confront the problem of how music works on the senses. The novel’s hero, Kapellmeister Lockmann, tunes a piano—to an idiosyncratic temperament of his own invention—as he proposes an intensely physical model for musical listening. He uses this demonstration, while simultaneously trying to start a love affair with the novel’s heroine, Hildegard von Hohenthal, to reclaim older ideas about natural temperaments and key characteristics in an era of heightened interest in the anatomy of cognition. But Heinse’s own opinions are not always the same as those of his characters. Drawing on his notebooks, I trace how Heinse struggled to come to terms with opposing views of his friend and colleague, the anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmering, and of the philosopher Immanuel Kant of how sound affects the body. Soemmering’s Über das Organ der Seele (1796) and Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790) both act as intertexts and paratexts to the novel, and Heinse more than once splits his own opinions about both books between his characters. The tuning scene addresses important questions about the hierarchy of the senses, the creation of musical meaning, and the freedom of performers and listeners to form their own interpretations of music. Heinse’s naturalist ideas about musical agency rub against the grain of a narrative—still current today—dominated by a transaction between heroic composers on the one side and awe-struck listeners on the other. To re-assess these ideas is to re-imagine a crucial hinge in music history.

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warbling choir' (the recorder's repetitive birdsong is highly irritating for Galatea, whether particularly rapid or not), it works less well in the other movement with a recorder solo, 'O ruddier than the cherry', sung by Polyphemus. This last aria makes Polyphemus so lumbering that he does border on buffoonery (although the strings' attack hints at his underlying menace), and it also encourages bass-baritone Matthew Brook to overemphasize the 'i' in 'ruddier'. Brook's rendition of 'Cease to beauty to be suing' is also too heavy. In his notes, Butt draws a connection between the time signatures of Galatea's and Acis's music, but fails to see a link between Polyphemus's 'Cease to beauty to be suing' and Acis's 'Love sounds th'alarm' (which is also too slow). The former is in 3/4 while the latter is in 3/8, and although these time signatures present basically the same triple metre, they highlight the difference between the lissomness of the youth and the clunkingfistedness of the giant (which is rather laboured if taken too measuredly). 'The flocks shall leave the mountains' is taken at a very deliberate andante, which lends it gravitas, and which perhaps makes the impending disaster more horrible, but in my opinion it is a little too slow-the voices struggle to cope (especially Polyphemus, having to elongate 'cannot'), and Butt makes the orchestral postlude representing Polyphemus's murder of Acis into a rather obvious accelerando. Had he taken the whole trio a little faster, he could have avoided this predicament, as again the semiquavers should not rush, for they represent the unstoppable rock bearing down on the hapless shepherd. The other problem with the slowness of some of Butt's tempos is that his singers are not quite up to the task. All are pleasing on the ear, but Galatea is a little on the thin side (for example in 'As when the dove'), Acis sounds as though he is still a choral scholarprofessional but lacking in dramatic effect-and Damon could do with more lyricism. However, it must be acknowledged that this is nit-picking, as all of them offer some delightful moments. Death brings out the best in Nicholas Mulroy (Acis), whose final rendition of the phrase 'sheds delicious Death' in Part I is lovely (although I am not sure that he quite conveys its double meaning); his portrayal of the dying Acis is properly pathetic, in the true eighteenth-century meaning of the term. In all, this is a thoughtful and highly successful interpretation of Acis and Galatea, and one that reminds the listener of the profundity of Handel's short and sweet work. katie hawks Eighteenth-Century Music