I also always enjoy Howard's posts and logic. Sterling Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 20, 2013, at 3:11 PM, Mathias Rösel <[email protected]> wrote: >> 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
