You're quite right about how people look at a "performing" art in an historic context, and the difficulties of bringing our own sensibilities to whatever the performance style of the period may have been - as well as how much of a block those very sensibilities may be to truly understanding what went on in, say, the medieval period, or the Baroque, or whenever.  Even today, with recordings, we react with a degree of shock in hearing Stokowski's rather full Romantic-seeming arrangements of Bach works, comparing them to the "leanness" of current "authentic" practices - which, as you point out, may be way off the mark.  One doesn't even have to go that far back in time.  I was preparing a work for presentation at a national conference of musicians in DC some years ago, and I had the fortune? misfortune? of having the composer literally at my shoulder.  As he stood there, metronome in hand, he would point out that the marking was 80 quarter notes to the minute, NOT 76, please!  Charitably, I wanted to rip his mustache off his face.  I wanted to point out to him that after a composer writes his piece of music, makes all the necessary tempi and dynamic and other markings, that rather like the child we spend 20-25 years getting ready for the world (or hoping the world is ready for HIM) you send him/it out with love, hope - and the realization the world's going to do things there that you might not agree with.  But you know what?  If he's/it's well-prepared, he/it will not only survive, but thrive.  So, all the worries about "getting it right" aside, we need to remember that even if we don't get it quite "right" we're supposed to ENJOY the music.  What a thought!  Wonder if that would make it 1000 years from now?

 

Ron Duquette

Fort Belvoir, VA

 Post scriptum:

 

My daughter just came back from a theater class (in high school) where they're preparing to stage a Shakespeare play. The tech class gave a series of presentations offering possible staging ideas for the play: in dynastic China, in Victorian England, in Las Vegas. Not one of the proposals suggested 16th-century Stratford-on-Avon, because the whole theater world thinks of that as stale and boring. Last year Ashland Shakespeare Festival produced "A Comedy of Errors" set in the Wild West. In theater, that's considered visionary. In music, heretical. Why the difference in attitude?

Hi, Allen. It's cute. Not funny, mind you, but cute. Sort of like Dada art, but more Monty Python than serious Beatles!

 

However, as a practicing musicologist (without portfolio ... er, Ph.D), please allow me to dissent with your skepticism about "authentic" performance."

 

First, nobody calls it that any more. Thanks to rampant political correctness, it's now called historically-informed performance. And that's what the spoof fails to recognize. Granted that we have no recordings of Bach performing, or Mozart or Beethoven, or for that matter Brahms, Frescobaldi, Palestrina, Lasso, Josquin, or even Guido d'Arezzo. But our goal is to learn as much as possible about everything that impinges on their performances (or COULD have done). And with every generation's new discoveries, we've come remarkably close to duplicating the scientific method by forming hypotheses and testing them in practice. (Example: "Bach intended his choral music for one voice on a part, since he wrote that his choirboys were always sick." Right. So we use operatically-tranied voices, to which Bach NEVER had access and which he NEVER used!!!!! So much for THAT hypothesis!) Arguing that if we can't learn EVERYTHING we don't know ANYTHING is akin to noting that if a boy and a girls start at opposite ends of a sofa and each moves half the distance between them, they will never come together, whereas they will almost certainly get close enough for all practical purposes!!

 

The implied (or expressed)criticism of historical study can very fairly be applied to the early generations of the early music movement, dating back to the 1890s and Arnold Dolmetsch. And the harpsichordist (whose name has temporarily escaped me) could safely claim that "I play Bach HIS way" and happily play on her plucked piano, since no one at the time knew any better. But every piece of data that we rediscover helps us get closer to those composers and to the way their music COULD have been played or sung. Sure, the string players used gut strings, and pre-Tourte bows, and played at pitches that were more often than not lower than we play at today, and they did NOT use our clunky modern equal temperament, but that knowledge does no one any good until they actually play the music using the equipment and performance practices that would have been used, and THEN the results are a revelation. Proper playing of ornamentation and improvisation of cadenzas, on the other hand, CAN be reconstructed from the treatises, and learned, and is again a revelation when we approach the music on its own terms and not, as Ralph Kirkpatrick said, "Looking back through a haze of Beethoven"!

 

Same thing for our modern "chorus" with (hopefully) equal numbers of female and male singers (but with too often too many sopranos with too heavy voices). Simply not the musical instrument the great works of the renaissance and baroque traditions were written for.

 

And finally, as someone who deals with the minutiae of music history on a daily basis, I have to point out that while the further back we go, the more confusing things become and the less sure we can be of what has been discovered, the opposite is also true. The closer in history we get to the present, the more we DO know, until the information density becomes rather overwhelming. And barring workwide thermonuclear war, I can't see that changing to the extent implied in the Beatles spoof. It describes, rather, the situation regarding the 40-some musical examples surviving from Before the Common Era, not the situation regarding our knowlege of, say Brahms and Bruckner. (Both superb choral composers, by the way.)

 

But one thing I do agree with: musicologists in 200 years, or 600, or a thousand, will be studying the 20th century music of those who reached out and touched the most lives through their music, not the music of the academic composers who wait (in vain, I'm afraid) for posterity to "discover" them. And the Beatles will be studied just as much as Bach has been, which is saying quite a lot!

 

All the best,

 

John

 

P.S. Regarding your Post Scriptum about your daughter's theater class, I agree that theater people and musicians have rather different attitudes toward historical performance, with theater lagging about 50-75 years behind music. The obsession with "updating" Shakespeare's stories--or 19th century operas for that matter--is more akin to the Stokowsky arrangements of Bach than to the HIP movement. In my opinion, of course. I can't wait for "Flying Dutchman" to be restaged as "Star Trek"!!!  (Or perhaps "Pigs In Space.")  With added Theramin, of course.