History and Performance Practices

Abstract

The study of performance practices in history has continued to attract considerable scholarly interest. It has also, predictably, come through a process of self-examination that has exploded rudimentary claims to authenticity and reliability. An era of innocence and enthusiasm has passed. Treatises from the past, whether by Johann Joachim Quantz for the flute or Leopold Mozart, Pierre Baillot, Louis Spohr, and CharlesAuguste de Beriot for the violin, are no longer regarded as straightforward sources about how things were actually done. Likewise, eyewitness accounts and oral traditions regarding the habits of past performers, particularly from eras before recording, are viewed more critically. Fashions regarding so-called authenticity in the performance of music from the past have changed. Each fashion in turn has been interpreted as mirroring a contemporary prejudice rather than the objective results of verifiable empirical research. The attempt to recover memory as to how music was performed has begun to struggle in greater detail with regional differences—microclimates of a kind—and with the evident gaps between published tracts and polemics and everyday habits. An analogy can be made to the history of church doctrine and theology: orthodoxies and normative ideals are articulated and disseminated by authorities, but these do not necessarily predict or define the actual local character of routine and regular worship in the past. What has emerged as even more problematic is the task of connecting historic performance practices to the ascription of meaning within musical events on the part of past performers and audiences. Even if one could reconstruct how a work was played, the purpose and effect of the music and the details of its performance, understood in terms of the impact on past audiences, remain elusive. If the uses of rubato, portamento, and even vibrato were differentiated and widespread, what did those specific habits signify and what meaning did they carry? Our aesthetic tastes and acoustic expectations clearly have changed. If one wanted to reproduce not the sounds but the impact of the past, what performance decisions would one make when facing a twenty-first-century