Book reviews • John Rink (ed.), Musical Performance: A Guide to Unders tand ing.

Just where does one advise students of performance to go to for an introductory text on the study of performance? Given the growth in academic investigation of musical performance, whether practice-based or scholarly (or somewhere in-between), it is surprising how few introductory texts exist within this area. There are some excellent academic monographs on performance (e.g. Dunsby, 1995) and a number of broad introductory texts on historical approaches (e.g. Lawson and Stowell, 1999). Similarly, there are excellent review articles if one wants to engage with the psychology of performance (see e.g. Palmer, 1997 or Gabrielsson, 1999). The closest to the book reviewed here is perhaps John Rink’s other collection of essays The Practice of Performance (1995), which drew together a number of approach-es to performance which fall into the category of “performance studies”. However, much of the literature in the area of performance is highly specialised and quite daunting to a performer or academic (or someone who crosses these boundaries) wishing to first dip their toe into this area. The recent publication o