> 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)
Wholeheartedly seconded Mathias > 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. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
