A Study in Geography, ‘Tradition’, and Identity in Concert Practice

Abstract

Responding to recent work on historical performance and to cultural anthropologies of music, this article presents a case study in performance practice within the Western classical tradition. It argues that the methods of performance preparation characteristic of the Hungarians György Kurtág and Ferenc Rados share underlying beliefs that, while by no means representative of a ‘school’, nonetheless indicate a common tradition of thought. Through observation and analysis, I demonstrate that this is characterized by a shared sense of ancestry, an emphasis on ‘nature’ and spontaneity, and a rejection of artifice and rationality. Typical of a strand of post-Enlightenment thought (represented most prominently in musicology by Theodor Adorno), the belief system is yet more specifically congruent with modern ideas of ‘Central Europe’ as projected by Milan Kundera and subsequent writers from the former Eastern Bloc. In that it shuns rationalized commercialism (artifice, showbiz) it comes to celebrate imperfection. A celebrated, or ‘necessary’, failure emerges as a critique of modernity's reified slickness. In other words, performance practice equals social utopia.