One element in the scholarship of Richard Taruskin has always troubled me, this relates to his views on performance practice in early music especially, but to performance practice generally. In volume IV of the Oxford History of Western Music he takes up the aesthetic reaction to the horrors of the First World War and describes how artists reacted to them by rejecting the subjectivity and expression of late romanticism in favour of a dehumanization, a turn to the objective, the crystalline, the geometric. (For the denumanization of art see the writings of José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, 1925, English translation 1968.)
This is a very obvious trend, of course, the musical manifestation was neo-classicism. The Symphonies of Winds (1920) by Stravinsky is a clear example:
Here is Taruskin's comment on the effect on musical performance:
A great change in the performance style of all European classical music, regardless of age or origin, followed the Great War. The ban on pathos was translated directly into a ban on two practices that symbolized pathos in musical performance: tempo rubato (spontaneous, unnotated variations in tempo) and similarly unnotated fluctuations in dynamics. Play with variable tempo and dynamics and you are playing "romantically." That is how all music was played up until the 1920s, as early phonograph recordings testify. No music is played like that any more, not even romantic music. All music is played "as written," within a hierarchical chain of command (composer too editor to performer with an additional step when a conductor is employed) that takes all initiative away from the person actually producing the sounds. [Oxford History of Western Music, Volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, p. 475]
Two things are obvious here: first, Taruskin is highlighting a real reaction to a major upheaval in European civilization--sometimes referred to as a cultural suicide attempt--and second, that he is very much over-egging the pudding. Sure, there is a remarkable quantity of musical performances in a wide variety of contexts that do indeed come close to eliminating tempo rubato and the shading of dynamics. Sometimes we call this being "in the groove" and sometimes it is just stiff and unmusical, but the truth of the matter is that shaping the rhythms and dynamics to heighten the musical expression not only did not die out after World War I, it was present before romanticism ever came along. Of course I can't dig around and pull up recorded examples from the Baroque era, but anyone familiar with Baroque music will realize that, while great quantities of it are motoric and in the groove, other great quantities of it only make sense if you understand that the performers were making use of phrase and dynamics. I'm not just referring to harpsichord music, whose dynamic possibilities are very limited, though rhythmic expression is not, but more to music for strings and lute. Can you really imagine the lute music of Denis Gaultier played the way Taruskin describes? I cannot.
So while I get his point, my own whole musical experience tells me that performers, especially of solo music, have always continued to use the resources of phrase and dynamics to shape and contour their musical performances. To take just one example, we have a host of recordings by Andrés Segovia that span much of the first half of the century and he never played anything without tempo rubato and dynamic fluctuation:
But this is not to deny the historical observation that post-World War I, there was a flight from the pretty and the charming in favour of the bare, the crisp and the unadorned. Some of this spilled over into performance practice, but musical expression never came close to being erased.
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