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)
Philip Ewell's blog post about Beethoven is a minor side note in a career built first on publishing thirty music theory papers, then on courageously shining light on Heinrich Schenker's repulsive political beliefs, and in so doing, exposing himself to an extraordinary amount of hate mail, threats, racist epithets and so on. His new book, On Music Theory, details the reception of his Schenker paper and the ensuing controversy, as well as a thoughtful set of recommendations for how to counteract music theory's lingering white supremacist ideology. I know you are being tongue in cheek but Ewell deserves your and your readers' respect.
ReplyDeleteEthan, you are such a one-note commentator. You only pop in here to post about social justice. If you didn’t have an academic track record, I would wonder if you were a parody account.
ReplyDeleteI pop in here when I see important ideas being treated flippantly by people who should know better.
ReplyDeleteTo my knowledge you never pop in here to actually engage with the ideas being discussed, but only if there is some possibility of displaying your social justice credentials. Case in point, this post, which was not even peripherally about Philip Ewell or his ideas but instead took a serious look at Taruskin on performance practice. Which you did not even mention.
ReplyDeletePhilip Ewell's main idea is that music theory pedagogy continues to carry the white supremacist baggage it acquired in the 1930s, and that choosing not to discuss it has been ineffective at addressing it. Making a crack about the Beethoven blog post (without engaging it on the merits) is not exactly talking about his ideas either.
ReplyDeleteI did a post focusing on Philip Ewell quite a while back and haven't felt the need to revisit it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if I get enraged enough I will do a whole post on "white supremacist baggage" but I rather doubt it!
Taruskin argued that performers like Harnoncourt and Leonhardt were trying to perform Bach as if it was Stravinsky. I never really understood that claim. Almost all of Stravinsky, with its cubist, bloc-like juxtapositions, requires strict, mechanical, non-rubato rhythm. I think the most metronomic Bach recordings were those made on modern instruments in the 1960s, just before Harnoncourt and Leonhardt started making their breakout recordings. Glenn Gould playing Bach on the piano is far more aesthetically Stravinsky-like than Gustav Leonhardt playing it on the harpsichord.
ReplyDeleteAlfred Brendel made a Bach piano album for Phillips in the 1970s - which I love. On the sleeve notes, he alludes to Leonhardt’s harpsichord playing style without directly naming him; but it’s obvious who he’s thinking of - Brendel knew Leonhardt personally, having studied alongside him in Vienna in the 1950s. He compares Leonhardt’s constant arpeggiation, desynchronisation of the hands and agogic rubato to Paderewski’s mannered and démodé way of playing Chopin. He’s being sarcastic, of course, but he’s closer to the truth than Taruskin. Leonhardt consciously broke away from the metronomic performance style of harpsichord playing then prevalent, playing with more rubato than just about anyone.
To be fair to Taruskin, I think his argument is more subtle than it first seems. He thinks the music of now probably should inform the way we play music of then. But this was Harnoncourt’s argument too. He said that he would be completely happy to hear hyper-modern performances of Bach, maybe even using electronic instruments. His complaint was that the musicians of his day weren’t performing Baroque music in a “now” way, but in a way which was simply the default of an era which was no longer “now” but wasn’t “then” either.
Even among Early Music performers working side by side, playing the same repertoire in the same Early Music festivals, there were some who tended to let the music emerge with relatively little fuss, and some who intervened aggressively with dynamics, agogic accents, extreme juxtaposition of legato and staccato, hairpin dynamics on long notes, extreme tempos, and so on. Christopher Hogwood’s and Reinhard Goebel’s Brandenburg sets were recorded very close together in time (1985 and 1987); yet they’re completely unalike. It’s clear that Taruskin loathed Hogwood’s performance approach; but how typical was Hogwood compared with Goebel, Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, Koopman and Kujiken? I’d say Hogwood was an outlier. Joshua Rifkin also favoured a relatively low-key style of performance. That was partly because he didn’t like the interventionist style of Harnoncourt and Goebel; in other words, he didn’t want to do anything which would timestamp his recordings as filled with the mannerisms of a 1980s early music group!
Oh yes, many good points. Taruskin acknowledges that some of his comments are a bit dated--performers are always moving on. And somewhere (though not in this essay, I think) he differentiates a lot between Leonhardt and other performers, calling Leonhardt's Brandenburgs his favorites.
ReplyDeleteI do think he captures a good point: performers are always looking to make the music come alive. For us, a lighter, more spritely rhythmic approach seems to be suitable whether or not evidence for it is in the historic record. The critique really is, why pretend we are reviving an actual historical performance practice? And yes, Gould is a very good example of the geometric style, where Leonhardt, especially his solo harpsichord playing, is rich in powerful expression and nuance.
Where I really diverge from Taruskin's view is with the lutenists and with French performers generally: there has always been lots of dynamic and rhythmic nuance in those performances and no hint of the "sewing machine" approach. But those repertoires are not ones he is very close to.
There is an important fundamental point in the argument though, and I will probably go into it in more detail if I decide to do a post on his huge 64 page paper "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past."
in another realm entirely, Matanya Ophee and other guitarists pointed out that playing everything Spanish Romantic Segovia style was not really the best way to play Giuliani or even necessarily Sor. Historically informed performance debates sounds like they played out differently in different scenes. Nobody should play Frank Martin's four short pieces like they're Asturias is too obvious to say, for instance, but Starobin didn't play Matiegka like he played Sor, IIRC.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read it yet but I did grab Dusan Bogdanovic's book on improvisation in sixteenth century style.
Oh yes, we guitarists have a very late example of romantic style in Segovia.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I have chosen to play 16th century vihuela music with historical 16th century ornaments and I think the music benefitted greatly.
Although I read more than the other guys on the roof, I don't have any formal music education and only started learning to play 8 years ago as an adult learner. So I don't have the academic language to fit into this discussion. However, as an obsessive listener (and LP-then-CD collector) for decades, I have some opinionated observations to toss in. While I admire and hope to amateurly imitate the HIP approach in my own early music playing, I also appreciate how the composers and musicians of those glorious centuries-past were not themselves living in the past, but rather modernists of their day, creating new music with the latest instrument technologies. It is a paradox that attempting to recreate their music requires adopting a different attitude than theirs was in their moment. It seems to me that only the very best artists can surmount that paradox by mastering the techniques of the past as best they can discern, and yet play the music now not as a museum piece but as living and immediate as it was in its original time. An example I offer is Christina Pluhar's L'Arpeggiata ensemble recording "Music For A While: Improvisations on Purcell." My emotional response is that her Latin dance-influenced jazzy Purcell is very "authentic" in the sense that I bet Henry Purcell would have loved it! Maybe not authentic as an exact imitation of the original sound, but no doubt informed by the best study of what that must have been and yet created today by spontaneous and improvising and very alive musicians as living music in our moment and as the audience we are in a much more cosmopolitan culture. After all, if Maestro Purcell were among us today, what would he be doing right now?
ReplyDeleteVery good points, Will.
ReplyDelete