AUTHENTICITY IN MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

by Bernard D. Sherman
sumber : http://www.bsherman.net/articles.html | diakses pukul 19:00, 21 Mei 2017

Reprinted from The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael J. Kelly (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998, four volumes). Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of
Oxford University Press. This material may not be copied or distributed without the prior permission of
Oxford University Press. Online text updated and revised.

In Western classical music in the later 20th century, the word “authentic” has often referred
to performances that use period instruments (or fascimiles) and that attempt to re-create
period performance idioms. Since the 1960s this approach has been both influential and
controversial. The debates have gone beyond performance practices to broad aesthetic
questions. The latter debates led, eventually, to the retirement of this usage of the term
"authentic."

History: Musical performance before the late eighteenth century typically focused on new
compositions, about which posterity was not expected to care. (See Weber, 1992. Exceptions,
he notes, were most likely in liturgical settings.) During the nineteenth century, however,
public concerts centered increasingly on music by earlier composers. One reason for this
trend was the era’s new awareness of history, which helped bring forth the idea of a canon of
masterpieces in music, with Beethoven and a few other composer holding classic status.
Other crucial developments included: an unprecedented rise in prosperity (Maddison, 2001),
sufficient to support widespread participation in art music; the growing significance of art
music for the expanding middle classes; and the fragmentation of the musical public into
diverse "taste groups" (Weber, 1979), with one group focused on respectful experience of the
music of the classic masters. This group eventually, in the later part of the century, defined
the culture of classical-music performance.

Lydia Goehr (1992) argues that the century brought a related shift: musical practice began to
be governed to an unprecedented extent by the concept of the musical “work.” Earlier eras,
she argues, were more likely to conceive of a piece of music as an act of performance, a
carrier of a text, or a functional part of some other event such as an aristocratic wedding or a
church service (although musicians had anticipated the "work concept" to varying degrees
since the Renaissance). The work concept, by contrast, elevates a piece of music to the status
of an autonomous, enduring, integral work of art.

Adopting the concept can, in turn, lead to a demand that performers be faithful to the works
they play. A short (though not necessary) next step is to greater concern for honoring
the performance intentions of the work’s composer. The ideal of serving the composer’s
intentions instead of the performer's might also have gained strength from the increasing
division of labor between the two groups, an example of a broader socioeconomic trend of
specialization.

Technology also played a role in the ascent of composers' intentions. New printing
technologies made sheet music inexpensive, so publishing became a primary means of
disseminating music. As Weber points out, the growing public for sheet music was dispersed
enough geographically that it could not be assumed to be familiar with the composer's
performance style. Partly for that reason, the new importance of publishing contributed to the
increasingly precise notation of performance instructions. It is clear that composers
sometimes notated precise instructions simply because publishers expected these to be
specified (Butt, 2002, p. 121) and because technologies of printing made it possible.

For whatever reasons, by the mid-twentieth century the composer's notation had come to
control the performer’s playing to a degree not equalled in other performing arts (such as
theater and dance).Admonitions to honor the composer’s performance intentions, though
recorded as early as the fifteenth century, became common in the nineteenth century (Bowen,
1993) and dominant in the twentieth.

One can go a step further and insist on playing music with the instruments and styles that the
composer used. Few nineteenth-century musicians took this step, partly because it does not
follow necessarily from the ideal of being faithful to the work and its maker: many
performers have believed that musical works possess an ahistorical essence, which does not
depend on the accidents of period performance practice. Another reason for discarding period
instruments may have been the nineteenth century’s general faith in technological progress,
evident in ongoing re-design of musical instruments. Most musicians believed that they could
serve works and composers best by using the latest instruments. Yet over the course of the
nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries, a growing minority of musicians believed
that period instruments and styles were part of the essence of a musical work.

Again, the change of attitude probably had multiple causes. One might be an increasing
disillusionment with modern life and with technological progress (the latter documented in
Heilbroner, 1994). Another may be the rise of modern attitudes in hermeneutics and
historiography, which could cast doubt on the assumption that modern playing styles and
instruments are improvements, since one’s preference for them is considered to be
historically contingent rather than neutral and objective (John Butt, personal communication,
1996). Also, Robert Morgan (in Kenyon, 1988) argues that the post-World War I advent of
radical styles of musical composition, which seemed discontinuous with the past, contributed
to a sense that the music of the past was no longer part of a living tradition and thus to be
played in the current style, as most nineteenth-century musicians believed. Instead,
masterworks of the past began to seem like heirlooms best preserved by being played in the
styles of their own periods. (Other proposed motivations are discussed in a later section of
this article.)

Attempts at historical performance began to occur regularly around the turn of the twentieth
century, and became increasingly prominent over the century’s course (Haskell, 1988). The
technological advances of recording played a critical role in allowing historical perfomers to
reach large audiences of listeners, critics, and fellow musicians. It also allowed period
instruments, which often produce less volume than modern ones and can be harder to keep in
tune, to come across more effectively to listeners than they might in a modern concert hall.
(That modern technology has been crucial to a historically oriented movement has often been
called ironic. A similar instance is that modern travel technologies allowed influential
performers to disseminate their approaches to many more musicians and listeners than would
have been possible in the past.) Historical performance gained commercial visibility in the
1960s and 1970s, by which time it had become widespread enough to be known as the “early-
music movement.” In the 1980s and 1990s it produced best-selling recordings of Bach,
Handel, and even Beethoven; and a few of its performers succeeded in bringing medieval and
Renaissance music to a much larger audience than it had generally reached before. The
affected repertoire expanded backwards as far as pre-Gregorian plainchant and forward to
include, eventually, music of Debussy and Schoenberg.

As historical performers began to play Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, “disputes over turf”
arose with mainstream players (Kerman, 1992). These disputes sometimes exemplify what
psychologists call ingroup/outgroup psychology (Brewer and Kramer, 1985). Thus, some of
the kinds of thinking one finds in ethnic warfare could be found in both the mainstream and
early-music camps: both were known to describe the other camp with simplistic stereotypes,
and to impute maleficent strength to it and beleaguered virtue to one’s own camp (Sherman,
1997, p. 5). The self-righteousness of ingroup psychology may contribute in part to the
moralistic tone of much argument for and against the early-music movement. In recent years,
however, the turf disputes have softened, giving rise increasingly to what Alfred Brendel
calls “true cross-fertilization” (1990, p. 224). Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a period-instrument
pioneer, has conducted the leading orchestras of Europe regularly.

Dispute has also arisen over the aesthetic underpinnings of the early-music movement, often
within the movement itself. The most influential critic, for example, has been Richard
Taruskin (1995), a musicologist who for many years was a professional viola da gamba
player and Renaissance choral director. The rest of this article will examine the issues raised
by Taruskin, the gambist/musicologist Laurence Dreyfus (1983), the keyboardist/ scholar
John Butt, the scholar and pianist Charles Rosen, the philosopher Peter Kivy (1995), and a
number of others.

Debates over Authenticity

The use of the term “authentic” to describe historical performance may, perhaps, have
originated by analogy to the term’s usage in musicology, where it refers to the assignment of
authorship: this piece is authentic Bach, that piece spurious. But applied to historical
performance it is “a baleful term which has caused endless acrimony” (Kerman, 1985, p.
192). The arguments against applying the term to historicism in performance have been
influential enough that early-music performers now almost always enclose it in scare quotes,
to indicate that they know better than to use the term naively (for convenience, I will use it
without quotes). Critics have attacked not only the terminology, but also the goals and
assumptions of historicist musicians. The critiques have taken many forms, but can be
classified into three groups: those that question the possibility of historical authenticity, those
that question its desirability, and those that examine the motivations of performers (Sherman,
1997, pp. 8–20).

Possibility. Some authors believe that it is impossible for us to perform music exactly as it
was done in its own era. In a few cases, such as the use of castrati singers, it is obviously
impossible (or repellent) to re-create a known practice. But more generally, evidence about
period performance practice is almost never complete, so performers must go beyond what
scholars can certify as historically accurate. Doing so involves the use of the performers’
imaginations—and modern musical imaginations differ almost inevitably from those of
previous centuries (Taruskin, 1995). The incompleteness of the evidence could short-circuit
attempts even to re-create only the audible parameters of a period performance, with no
concern for how context affects musical communication.

But contextual factors do figure prominently in many other arguments against the possibility
of authenticity. For example, one type of argument points to differences between modern and
period experience in such realms as economics, politics, religion, and science; it argues
(sometimes plausibly, sometimes not) that such factors affect how we play and hear music.
Another contextual barrier to true historical re-creation is that our contexts of performance
and listening—CDs, radios, and concert halls—are usually quite different from those of the
past, such as feasts, church services, and salons. Such contexts affect the nature of
performance; one plays differently for one’s private edification in a music room than for
critics in Carnegie Hall (Rosen, 1990). Also, the advent of recordings increased audiences’
demands for technical perfection, as well as performers’ concerns with literalness, rhythmic
precision, ensemble, and accuracy (Philip, 1991); it may be impossible for artists raised in the
era of recordings to ever be as comfortable with the approximate as their historical forebears
were.

Such factors may limit the historical veracity even of performances that are embedded in
“historical reconstructions”—e.g., concerts that stage the liturgical ceremonies for which the
featured sacred music was written. And liturgical reconstructions face another type of barrier
to historical authenticity: the audience. At such reconstructions, most audiences know they
are at a concert to be entertained or edified, rather than at a service to engage in worship.
Moreover, few audiences share the emotional or theological associations that period
audiences felt toward specific texts, chorales, or plainchant melodies. This is an example of
another broad argument for impossibility, involving reception, which says that composers
wrote for audiences whose experiences not only of music but also of much that music refers
to differed from those of our time.

Desirability. Regardless of whether historical accuracy is possible, some authors doubt that it
is an artistically worthy goal; they especially deny that it is a valid standard by which to judge
performances. If one’s goal is to play exactly as was done in the period, these critics argue
that period performances cannot be assumed to have been better in any meaningful way than
modern, unhistorical ones. If one’s goal is to re-create period sounds, Charles Rosen (1990)
points out that sound per se was usually not as central to the conception of early music as it
sometimes is to later music. (An objection sometimes made to this argument, however, is that
period instruments are often valued not as means of re-creating period sound per se, but as
means for gaining a feeling for the articulation of musical phrases, or for gaining insight into
the constraints that led the composer to write as he or she did; Levinson, 1990, pp. 390–408,
makes a related case for period instruments, and it is central to Butt's arguments, 2002.)

As mentioned earlier, the ideal of historical authenticity does not follow inevitably from the
ideal of serving the composer’s performance intentions. Most mainstream performers espouse
the “composer’s intention” ideal as strongly as most historical performers do (though the
degree to which either truly aspires to the ideal has been questioned by John Butt). And some
historical performers seek not to serve the composer’s intentions so much as to revive period
performance practices. But many link these ideals; thus arguments against the desirability of
historical performance often reconsider the “composer’s intention” ideal. Some critics argue
that the composer’s performance intentions are rarely clear or fixed (Taruskin, 1995, p. 54–
55), and that even when precise they cannot be assumed to be superior to anyone else’s (ibid.,
p.190–93; Kivy, 1995, pp. 162–69). Dipert (1980) distinguishes between the composer’s
“high-level” performing intentions (such as aesthetic effects) and “low-level” ones, which
include the means for making those aesthetic effects audible; when these levels conflict, he
says, we should give priority to the high-level ones. Kivy (1995, p. 30–46) distinguishes
between the composer’s strong intentions and his mere wishes, suggestions, and weak
intentions, which may include many details of performance. Sometimes a composer’s
stronger intentions, such as wanting the most effective possible performance of his work for
each given audience and concert situation, might be served best by not using the means
available in his era. Butt (2002) proposes a non-hierarchical division into two broad types of
intention: Active intentions (which he defines as "a composer's specific decisions concerning
such matters as instrumentation, tempo, dynamic, ornamentation, articulation, etc." all of
which may or may not be notated); and passive intentions, which he describes as "those
factors over which [the composer] had little control, but which he consciously or
unconsciously assumed" (pp. 89-90). While the passive intentions tend to be less conscious,
"this association is by no means fixed." The value of the passive intentions, says Butt is to
help us "reconstruct the composer's mental and experiential world"; but because some passive
intentions couldn't or wouldn't have been realized in the actual circumstances of the day, "far
from being synonymous with the notion of historical fidelity, [intentionality] actually works
against it."( 91).

Another argument is that the performer’s main duty is not to the composer, who forfeits
“ownership” upon publication, but to the modern audience (Taruskin, 1995, p.47). Modern
audiences, we saw, may have different aesthetic backgrounds than period audiences; thus
they may be better served by unhistorical performances. And “period ears” might not
necessarily be preferable to modern ones for listening to old music (Kivy, 1995, pp. 214–
17)—modern audiences may understand the music better in some cases, if not in others. Butt
(1996), however, raises a concern, familiar from such modernists as Eliot Carter, about the
“dictatorship of the marketplace" in arguing that audience appeal should not be priviliged.
Indeed, Kivy (1995, p. 184) argues that utilitarian arguments can be used to defend a
performer’s not simply catering to modern audiences—although without audience approval,
he admits, a performance style will never prevail. Kivy also argues that it is understandable in
our “culture of the author” that we expect performers to begin their musical preparation by
considering composer’s performance intentions, even if they end up rejecting those intentions
when other solutions seem to them to work better (ibid., pp. 185–86).

In practice (and sometimes in theory), many historical performers determine on a pragmatic,

case-by-case basis whether it is desirable to use period performance practices. Admittedly,
some try to use as much of the evidence as possible, and believe that this produces better
musical results (though Taruskin argues—see below—that even these performers are
unconsciously selective); but other performers distinguish between historical practices that
seem to them beneficial or important to a successful performance, and historical practices that
seem insignificant or even harmful. In a few repertories a consensus exists over the
desirability of historical practices, but such repertoires are rare. The lack of consensus
suggests that determining which historical practices are desirable is not an objective process,
but is influenced by the performer’s (and the era’s) priorities and concepts of music.

A further reason that consensus is rare may be that an informed choice between modern and
period practices or instruments often involves making trade-offs. Period styles and
instruments usually have both advantages and disadvantages, as do modern instruments and
styles. A fortepiano, for example, has a wider variety of articulations than a modern grand,
but a narrower dynamic range. Which instrument one prefers will depend in part on which
costs and benefits concern one most. Again, such valuation is generally influenced by one’s
aesthetic priorities and beliefs, and not simply by the demands of the music.

Motivation. Some critics have looked not at the justification for the authenticity enterprise,
but at the reasons why so many musicians undertake it. The most obvious reason is that the
musicians are convinced that historical practice yields better performances; in a few cases
(such as French Baroque music) this explanation is widely accepted. But critics have posited
other, more complex and sometimes less conscious motives. We have already mentioned
some of them—disillusionment with technological progress, the rise of modern hermeneutics,
and a sense of separation from the past—but there are a variety of other proposed motives.

One of them is competition for attention and status in a field that is increasingly crowded. If
great performers have already fully explored the mainstream style and repertory, one way to
make one’s mark is to stake out new and unconquered musical territory either in repertory or
in performance style. The primacy of recording has increased the urgency of this motivation,
as the back-catalogs grow; historical performance allows one to be novel without being
overtly willful (in violation of the norms of classical performance today). A related but less
cynical formulation sees historical performance as an attempt to inject novelty into an ailing
concert life, whose circumscribed repertory and performance styles were leading to atrophy.
Many contemporary works had, since World War I, been unpalatable to the majority of
listeners, and thus could not offset this trend, but the early-music movement could provide
both approachable new repertory and new ways of playing familiar works.

The most widely discussed and debated motivation hypothesis is that of Taruskin. He posits a
discrepancy between the conscious and the hidden motives of early-music performers. While
performers think they are trying to use musicological scholarship to re-create the sounds of
the past, what unconsciously motivates them, he believes, is the wish to create a style of
performance that satisfies modern tastes. He illustrates this with examples of artists using
historical evidence selectively, privileging evidence that accords with modern taste while
ignoring or dismissing evidence that does not. Although Taruskin occasionally condemns
instances of these processes, his defining position is to praise them: he says that they give
historical performance its artistic relevance. It is a vastly greater thing, he says, to be the “true
voice of one’s time” than to be the “assumed voice of history” (1995, p. 166). Taruskin has
many critics, some of whom argue that his analysis of motivation applies to some but not all
of early-music performance. Another one, John Butt, argues that Taruskin is right in saying
that modern taste ineluctably conditions performance, but wrong in arguing that this taste
specifically reflects the aesthetics of Modernism. Butt instead sees it at "the crossroads" of
the modern and postmodern (the latter as defined, controversially, by Frederic Jameson as a
"cultural reflex" that arises once the process of modernization is "completed").

Another idea is that historical performance motivates performers by giving them special
latitude. This view argues that Western art music today places authoritarian demands on
performers—above all, that they must honor the composer’s authority as embodied in the
written score—but that these demands conflict with our artistic ethos of individual creativity
and expression. Since period idioms are often believed to require inflecting the music in ways
not indicated in the score (for example, by adding embellishments), historical performance
may let a performer innovate without being censured for ignoring the authority of the
composer (see Dulak, 1993, 1995, and Sherman, 1997, pp. 19-20). Others argue, however,
that historical performance might actually increase the authoritarian demands placed on
performers, by adding (or, at times, substituting) the authority of musicology to the other
demands already present. (Marc Perlman and Laurence Dreyfus have developed arguments
related to this point, as yet unpublished.)
Another approach relates the motives of historical performance to other changes in modern
attitudes toward the past. Butt (2002, pp. 164 - 217) relates the rise of the period-instrument
world to the "Heritage" movement of architectural preservation; he illustrates specific causal
connections in Great Britain and the Netherlands. He sees the mentality involved as reflecting
a compensation for a sense of historical disorientation.

One might also note the similarities with other musical trends to which the term "authentic" is
sometimes applied. Middle-class America's adoption of the blues has favored what seemed a
raw, "primal" style (e.g., that of Robert Johnson; Wald, 2004), which fit a sense of
authenticity - a myth of the noble primitive - but Elijah Wald has shown that this is worlds
apart from what black artists and audiences of the era preferred or what Johnson represented
to them (Wald reports on the young Muddy Waters singing more Gene Autry than blues
songs, and Delta audiences loving pop standards). Could the roughness of the period-
instrument performances of Harnoncourt in the 1960s and 70s have appealed in a similar way
to audiences for whom Karajan had come to feel slick and overly civilized? We might also
note the growing interest in "world music" - the music of non-Western traditional cultures -
which may have appealed to white middle-class audiences, partly by association with a sense
of rootedness and authenticity. Parts of the early-music movement may relate to what the
ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman refers to as "singing someone else's song" - the mastering
the music of a foreign tradition, as in the American ensembles devoted to performing
authentic Gamelan music. HIP performers like William Christie, in his work in France on
French Baroque music, and Alan Curtis, in his work in Italy on Italian Baroque music, may
represent a similar phemonenon, although one with a very different relationship to social
class. (Christie's work seems to embrace the romance of traditional European aristocratic
rank, quite in contrast with those who wish to perform authentic South American folk or
popular music.)

Despite their contradictions, all the above motivations may operate simultaneously, perhaps
even within a single musician. And other motives have been suggested or claimed. As
implied in his comments on intentions, Butt (quoted in Sherman, 1997, p. 175) says he is
concerned as a performer with historical issues to the degree that they help him understand
the composer’s creative process.

The Future of Historical Performance

Some of today's most distinguished historical performers agree that their own work will
someday appear to reflect the tastes of our time rather than of the historical eras being
reconstructed. Perhaps the very concern with historical verisimilitude will appear a
peculiarity of our time. On the other hand, some of the historical performers’ work might
well be considered to have improved the performance of some repertoire, and some may even
come to be regarded as historically accurate. Meanwhile, certain trends in historical
performance have increasingly influenced mainstream performance. Other trends may turn
out to do so; the revival of the art of improvisation, in music ranging from the medieval
instrumental pieces to Mozart concertos, may become influential and, if so, would be a
significant legacy. This may be the sort of legacy that Goehr (1992, p. 284) has in mind when
she speculates that the early-music movement may be positioned to provide modern musical
life with an alternative to the “work” concept. (Taruskin [1995, p. 13] complains that
historicist performers have often applied the “work” concept anachronistically to music from
eras that did not themselves possess it; he particularly welcomes these experiments in
improvisation [ibid., pp. 284–89].)
Some historicist performances might be remembered for musical excellence, unrelated to
historical accuracy. Even the critics mentioned above have often lavished praise on specific
performers. The most important legacy of the historical performance movement may be those
performances that attain authenticity in the senses more often used in the arts: those of
conviction, self-knowledge, spontaneity, and emotional honesty.

—Bernard D. Sherman

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