Performance Practice Performance as Discipline

1
Performance Practice Performance as Discipline

• 1.There is now some 1,000 years of notated music
  in the Western Art Tradition.
• 2. But for the music to be brought to life as the
  composer intended we need to go beyond the
  written message.
• 3. It is this interpretation of tradition, or
  lack of it, that constitutes performance practice
• 4. Has developed as an important subject area
  with its own literature in the last 100 years.

2
Back 100 years to the late Romantics

• With music from the high romantic period which
  has been continuously played since being composed
  we are on fairly firm ground. Brahms and
  generations following him.
• The music is annotated with directions to the
  performer as to how the notes are to be played.
• The instruments he composed for and the musical
  language he used are still in use.
• The tonality the composer assumed was based on 12
  equally spaced notes to the octave, giving access
  to all 24 minor and major keys on an equal basis.
  
• There are recordings from the 1890s. However
  they do show how differently the music was
  interpreted just a 100 years ago.

3
Back 300 years to the Baroque and Handel

• Go back 300 years to Handel and the baroque and
  problems are greater.
• We must consider the musical world he knew and
  the instruments at his disposal as it was within
  these constraints that he composed.
• Harmony was more restrictive than that of Brahms,
  but within the smaller number of keys in which he
  wrote his ear was more sensitive to inaccuracy of
  tuning.
• Each of the 12 semitones were not equal more
  consonance in a smaller range of keys.
• Minimal performance directions of speed,
  phrasing, dynamics.
• Todays performers need recourse to period
  treatises and musical commentaries as well as
  surviving instruments to recreate a reasonable
  picture of the musical world Handel inhabited.

4
Back 600 years to Dunstable and late Medieval

• Late medieval world and the problems are of an
  altogether greater magnitude.
• Tonality was different again (Pythagorian) and
  the notation very different.
• Performance conditions utterly different no
  concept of a concert in late medieval period.
• We have little idea how instruments were included
  in the performance of polyphonic music, if at
  all.
• We have now to fall back on pictorial evidence,
  accounts and chronicles to throw light on
  performance practice.

5
But is there more we should do?

• At a deeper level we may wish to consider how the
  composer intended his music to be performed.
• Public concerts were unknown before the late 17th
  century.
• Composers may have intended to the music to
  fulfill a function ritual, religious,
  accompaniment to dance, etc.
• Are we undermining the composers intentions if we
  ignore these assocations. E.g. Saties Furniture
  Music

6
The Stuff of Performance Studies

• Primary Sources the music as notated,
  instruments, iconography, treatises and literary
  accounts, editions, contemporary tastes.
• Understanding of style national idioms,
  articulation, melodic inflection, tempo,
  ornamentation, extemporisation and improvisation.
  
• Conditions and practices pitch, temperament,
  vocal styles, venues and programmes, orchestral
  constitution and placement, direction.

7
Is this going a bit far?

• Given that we cannot recreate the music as the
  composer intended, should we try?
• Can we assume that a composer would want his
  music heard today in the way that he conceived
  it?
• Most people would allow that a composition can
  benefit from a variety of interpretations. So
  does anything go?
• Composers are often pleased to adapt their
  compositions to the needs of specific
  performances. So license to do it your way?

8
Case of Glen Gould

• Gould believed Bach would have wanted his music
  played on a modern grand had it been available to
  him. He felt Bach would have preferred it.
• Why should we deny composers the benefits of
  modern technology just because it was not
  available to them in their own time?

9
Development of Historical Awareness.

• There has now been over 100 years of development
  in the historical performance of music (theory
  and practice) and it is now part of the
  mainstream.
• Ideas of authenticity developed in the
  performance of early music and now arguably
  affects all music performance.
• There have always been critics Leopold
  Stokowski believed in musical progress and in a
  continuous tradition that did not need
  interpretation by experts.

10
The Current Scene

• Up until the 1980s the precepts of historical
  performance practice were unchallenged.
  Conspiracy of silence.
• Then early music specialists started to tackle
  baroque, classical and romantic repertoires the
  debate hotted up.
• Some saw the historical/academic approach as
  lacking in expression and too often indulgent
  towards poor standards.
• Lose of something vital of a living culture?

11
The arguments against

• Lawrence Drayfus suggests that the authentic
  musician acts willingly in the service of the
  composer, denying any form of self-expression,
  but attains this by following the text-book rules
  for scientific method with a strictly empirical
  programme to verify historical practices. This
  is then magically transformed into the composers
  intentions.
• Richard Taruskin I am convinced that historical
  performance today is not really historical that
  a thin veneer of historicism clothes a
  performance style that is completely of our own
  time, and is in fact the most modern style
  around and that the historical hardware has won
  its wide acceptance and above all its commercial
  viability precisely by virtue of its novelty, not
  its antiquity.

12
More Thoughts

• Peter Kivy took the philosophical argument a step
  further by arguing for several categories of
  historical authenticity, relating to a composers
  original conception, restoration of sound
  materials, the performers individual expression
  and the meaning attached to a piece by its
  audience.
• The efficacy of historical performance has
  continued to divide musical opinion with a
  dedicated opposition.
• A last word from Pinchas Zuckerman on historical
  performance asinine stuff a complete and
  absolute farce nobody wants to hear that stuff.
  I dont.  

13
How does it affect me? I just want to play.

• It is not possible to be an innocent. You have
  to make a stand. You cannot plead ignorance.
• Awareness of ideas on performance practice are so
  much part of the mainstream that to ignore them
  will place you in the anti-historical camp by
  default.
• These concerns get more pressing the older your
  music but it affects all performance practice
  including 20th century.
• If you are a performer you must, at the very
  least, be informed.