On Dec 19, 2013, at 5:27 AM, Christopher Wilke <chriswi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> This also fits in nicely with Richard Taruskin's often stated thesis > that early music performance practice today is really a modern > fabrication that seeks to apply 20th (now 21st) century aesthetic > preferences to past music. This would make sense only if there were a single 20th-century aesthetic preference. Taruskin's usual lucidity rather deserted him here, floating away in a sea of abstract nouns. It all falls apart when you try to be specific about it. For example, he famously suggested (in his article in Early Music magazine around 1983, if not in Text and Act, a book I've never succeeded in slogging all the way through) that Emma Kirkby's straight delivery had as much to do with Joan Baez as with being historically informed, an odd notion in my view, since I always found Baez' vibrato too intense for my taste. But even assuming Taruskin chose a good example, why did Kirkby emulate Baez, rather than some other singer who was popular in the sixties and early seventies? She could have chosen to sing like Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Rod McKuen, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin (wouldn't you love to hear Jagger and Joplin sing "Sweet Kate"?), John Lennon, Andy Williams, Merle Haggard, Birgit Nilsson or Beverly Sills, all of whom represented current aesthetic preferenc! es. Why not any of them as the model for a "modern fabrication"? I'm inclined to go for the obvious explanation that answers questions rather than raising them: people in early are doing what they think they're doing. The important thing about "20th-century aesthetic preferences to past music" is that the 20th century preferred past music. Audiences turned out for music of the 18th and 19th centuries more than for the new stuff. That had never happened before. Classical music, and the symphony orchestra in particular, became museums preserving music of previous generations, and the logical and inevitable outgrowth of that phenomenon was that some of the curators wanted to do it "right," just like the curators who cleaned the old cloudy varnish off the Rembrandt painting called the "Night Watch" and discovered it wasn't a night scene at all. > Indeed, the technically clean, vibrato-less, > metronomic, inexpressive character of many performances of early music > nowadays seems to be an artistic reflection of mechanized > industrialization, assembly lines, Because early musicians spend lots of time in factories???? Beware the logical fallacy of "they exist at the same time, therefore there must be some cause and effect," or you can wind up joining the "vaccination causes [insert your favorite ailment here]" crowd. Cause and effect requires a mechanism. In any event, mechanized industrialization and assembly lines have coexisted for nearly a century with continuous vibrato, which is largely a post-World War I development and is still the dominant way of playing and singing classical music -- some higher-level orchestras have taken to playing Mozart differently from the way they play Rachmaninoff, but it hasn't filtered down much to the less exalted professional ranks. > and the repeatable, homogenized > regularity of product made possible by the use of computers. I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you talking about digital recording, or something else? > It would be too much of a stretch to suggest that the approach of > Segovia and contemporaries provides a model of early interpretation > today, but one might be able to argue that, being older, some aspects > of those aesthetic priorities were (un/subconsciously) closer to the > spirit of earlier times than the modern performance dogma. True in a very limited way, insofar as the spirit of earlier times was "I play the way I play because I like to play that way; I play the best way I can based on my own inclinations and the way I was taught to play." That's essentially the way nearly everyone did it until the early music movement built momentum, and it works very well until you start playing something outside the current style, such as -- oh, I don't know -- Mozart or Bach. Or Dowland. Or Beethoven. The notion of fidelity to Beethoven's intent, let alone Albeniz', did not occur to most musicians of Segovia's generation. Toscanini, who was older than Segovia and active the first half of the 20th century, was known for being faithful to "the score" precisely because it made him unusual. Critics, biographers and the musicians who played under him went on and on about it. Landowska's comment about "you play Bach your way and I'll play it his way" was similarly famous because it was out of the mainstream. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
