Coverage of Medieval and Renaissance instruments in their modern reconstructions. The 1985 University of California Press edition of the Handbook can be found in almost every significant music library. The Kallisti edition has a new preface and corrects some typos, but is otherwise unchanged except that it is a spiral bound paperback and has different dimensions. Elements more than two measures long overlap each other, and because lighter elements are more abundant than heavy ones, the music becomes increasingly contrapuntal as it progresses. Listen to part of this recording.
All players read from the score, which is notated on just two staves.
The use of various clefs and transpositions results in the doubling of both lines in multiple partials up to the tenth, producing sonorities of a brilliance and splendor seldom paralleled. A repeated quotation from Berlioz's Harold in Italy hints that in this concerto, too, the orchestra is the hero, while the soloist plays the role of outsider, commentator, or invited guest. The disturbing tone of the first movement is abandoned in the second as the orchestra cheerfully puts a Chilean folk melody through its paces while the soloist surfs along the top of the variations. The original melody was conceived for divided panpipes, and its continuous hocketting infests all the variations as well. In many passages, no instrument plays more than one note at a time.