Dear Howard,
I must confess, that the logic of Your Arguments is always a very great
pleasure, a light in the darkness of December.
Thank You
Andreas (Berlin)
Am 20.12.2013 19:54, schrieb howard posner:
On Dec 19, 2013, at 5:27 AM, Christopher Wilke<[email protected]> 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 prefere!
nc!
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.
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