Invidious Antonyms!

One thing I particularly enjoy about Richard Taruskin's prose is his ability to slip in the stiletto, almost without the victim noticing. This particular phrase comes from an essay on historic performance practice, or what pretends to be so. Referring to "authenticity" in performance practice he says:

There it is at last in all its purloined majesty, this word that simply cannot be rid of its moral and and ethical overtones (and which always carries its invidious antonym in tow) being used to priviledge one philosophy of performance over all others.

Of course that "invidious antonym" that he cleverly avoids stating is "inauthenticity," with which no self-respecting musician would wish to be cursed!

How does one build a career as a superstar musicologist? Susan McClary did so by metaphorically accusing Beethoven of being a rapist, Philip Ewell by also accusing Beethoven, but of being merely "above average." Ouch! And Richard Taruskin did so, rather more elegantly, by choosing to examine the ideology lurking behind the Early Music, authentic performance practice and historically-informed performance movements. Yes, in later years it was his astounding Stravinsky monograph and the weighty Oxford History that spread his renown, but in the early days, in the 1980s, it was his papers on performance practice, later collected in the first book of his essays, Text and Act, that really kicked up the dust. The first time I ever encountered his writing was the essay "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past" in this volume, assigned reading in a doctoral seminar.

I can recall, upon reading that paper, not being very impressed by the argument which seemed to me unconvincing. At the time I was a performer, just beginning to transition into being a musicologist and frankly, I just didn't have the intellectual context to really grasp his argument. Since I am now re-reading Text and Act, I think it might be a good time to do an overview of the argument which spreads over quite a few papers and approaches the issue from a number of different angles. I think at the end of the day, we can get a pretty good handle on the issue which might reveal quite a bit about us, and early music and the act of performing.

Let's start by taking a look at Taruskin's first paper on the topic, first published in 1982, "On Letting the Music Speak for Itself." That's one of those deceptively tricky clichés that, after reading Taruskin, you learn to be wary of. Let's anatomize the argument:

• Historical performance practice is now a recognized subdiscipline
• Let's examine the assumptions that underlie current thinking
• One is "let the music speak for itself" --i.e. don't gussy it up
• This implies a mistrust of performers and interpretation (cf Stravinsky, Babbitt and even Brahms)
• Oddly, in the case of Stravinsky especially, the performances vary wildly from the score
• Music cannot, in fact, speak for itself so what this has to really mean is "let the composer speak for himself." That opens up an epistemological can of worms.
• Composers' intentions may be unknowable, not exist, or not be relevant
• the idea seems to be to try and re-create the external conditions of the original performance but would this actually recreate the composer's inner experience?
• The purpose of all this is to make our performance "authentic"
• Musicological ideals of performance style actually owe a lot to the modernist aesthetic associated with Stravinsky after the First World War
• He connects this also with the "dehumanization" described by Ortega y Gasset in 1925 and the depersonalization discussed by T. S. Eliot in1917
• Music has to be imaginatively re-created in order to be performed
• Lost performing traditions have to be re-invented
• An historical reconstruction would be merely antiquarian
• Authoritative and compelling performances of old music demand a vividly imagined and coherent performance style
• Authenticity stems from conviction of the individual performer who is only interested in the individual cases, pieces with unique meaning
• Scholarship, on the other hand, is always about generalization; scholarly methods don't deal with uniqueness
• So the performer must use intuition as the guide
• Historical reconstruction performances are actually modernist: the artwork is an autonomous object
• The modernist artist is in communion with Art whereas for artists in the past it was about the process or activity
• One indicator is that, with few exceptions, performers of early music today are not great improvisers which was the norm historically (this is probably less true today than in 1982)
• Ironically, in early music performance, the suspension of personality is an indicator of the modern sensibility
• A musicologist is someone capable of playing 14th century music with 17th century ornaments (my joke, but it fits with what he is saying)

You really need to read the whole thing, which is not very long, to get the flavor of the argument, but this will give you the bare bones. In the early 80s was precisely when I was discovering the early music movement for myself and I was loading up Bach lute suites with piles of ornaments and agonizing over tempo relationships. The short essay I am summarizing above is just a brief assay into the question and discussion will expand a lot in later papers.

For an envoi, here is an historical historical performance, meaning one from the fairly early days: Concentus Musicus Wein, Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1964.