This post was written for my Bibliography & Research in Music (MUTH 65200) course at Ithaca College. I will be posting eight reflections from the class here throughout the course of the semester. You can find the other posts under the category Bib Class Reflections.
The readings this week are united not only in subject (early music), but in attitude. Each offers a skeptical, contrarian take on the historical performance movement in classical music.
In Slominsky’s dictionary he defines Urtext as a “magic word” and a “peculiar obsession of 20th century music scholars.” An urtext in music is the original manuscript as set down on paper by the composer (errors and hard-to-read handwriting included).
These urtexts are sought after versions of important works because they supposedly offer bonus insight into what the composer intended. But, as we come to read in Taruskin and Kozinn’s pieces in the New York Times, unveiling and obeying a composer’s intentions might not be as important as we pretend it is.
In “The Spin Doctors of Early Music,” which was published in 1990, Richard Taruskin makes the case that “historical” performances are almost always inaccurate, and reveal far more about the modern performer than they do about performance practice in the time period of the composer being performed. Taruskin claims that our obsession with representing antiquated music and calling it authentic stems from the post modern values of literalism, impersonality, and superficiality. Far from dismissing the movement, Taruskin actually celebrates “early music” performances as a development of the “perfectionist standards” of classical music that has helped introduce new timbres and idioms. Even though it is “historical masquerading,” the result has been innovation that is decidedly modern.
Written twenty years later, “Composer’s Intent? Get Over It” continues the dialogue on “authentic performance practice.” Moving beyond the question of authenticity in Renaissance and Baroque styles, Kozinn questions the importance of authenticity when performing new music written by living composers, especially ones whose “intent” can still be explored via in person discussions and self made recordings. Kozinn suggests that even with unprecedented access to the composer’s wishes, the performer’s interpretation is far more important in order to relay the music to audiences. Rather than performing works by Ravel, Webern, and Glass as they told us to, we should perform the works as we wish for them to be heard (even if that means injecting feeling, contextualizing the work through concert talks, or changing a given number of repetitions).
This sentiment is echoed by Mendelssohn who, according to the Grove Dictionary’s definition on Early Music, “heavily cut, rearranged, and romanticized” a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew’s passion with a large orchestra and choir of 158 voices. Writing for Grove, Haskell says, “Mendelssohn looked upon early music not as a body of historical artifacts to be painstakingly preserved in their original state but as a repository of living art that each generation could — indeed should — reinterpret in its own stylistic idiom.” Mendelssohn’s approach is just one among centuries of approaches of anachronistic music. The “Early Music” definition in Grove starts with the “concept of a canonical repertory of ‘ancient’ music” in 18th century England, France and Prussia, and accelerates all the way up to the current impact on music education and concert life today. Throughout time living musicians have treated the work of their predecessors with varying degrees of respect and disregard, so much so that the modern understanding of historical performance (with the added complexity of Taruskin and Kozinn’s observations) has almost become an individual performer’s way of personally revealing their feelings on the nature of music itself.
These readings come at an interesting time for me as I prepare Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and a new piece by one of my peers, Jonathan Rainous.
With Stravinsky, our conductor has decided to perform the original music but with the adapted text by Kurt Vonnegut, who brings to light the gruesome side of war. Who knows if Stravinsky would have sanctioned this performance, or was even thinking about this aspect of war while writing the music, but we are choosing to present it in a way that will speak to the Ithaca veteran group who plans to attend the performance.
With the Vivaldi, a small group of string players from the Chamber Orchestra will be reinterpreting the work to be performed in an innovative way (with lighting, staging, and re-orchestration). We are certain that the way we perform this work, on modern instruments and with soloists visible to the audience, would have never happened when Vivaldi was a musical director. However, we are choosing to make artistic decisions about the performance that celebrate Vivaldi’s music by revealing in new ways what we find most interesting about it.
And finally, with Jonathan’s new violin duo, Gabriella and I have had the chance to rehearse the brand new work four times, of which Jonathan was at two. In a truly collaborative way he has marked, edited, and re-written the parts as he hears us play them. We have been able to ask him questions about his inspiration and intention for the work that we would never be able to for the pillar works of our repertory, which I find very exciting. However, it makes me wonder if we are doing his piece a disservice by not interpreting it exclusively on our own. I wonder, if Jonathan weren’t around to answer our questions, how we would interpret his first version of the score compared to his new, edited one. I wonder how Jonathan’s stake in this first performance, and subsequent ones, differ from our own.
How much does an Urtext really matter? How much does Stravinsky or Vivaldi’s original vision of the performance of their pieces matter? I don’t know. My hunch is they matter something, but not everything. And if I follow that hunch (to be as informed as I can about a work without dismissing the contemporary experiences I can bring to it), well I’m really just making a unique, artistic decision after all.
All of our decisions, whether historically informed or not, are merely individual, artistic ones. This, to me, is liberating in a terrifying sort of way.
