Performance practice, as an academic discipline, is the evidence-based study of the performance of music and other arts at particular historical periods. Types of evidence include actual performance spaces and artifacts, designs and depictions of them, along with theoretical or practical treatises and critical writings. The relationships studied include the conventions for understanding written notations and the context of practices within which instructions for performance were used (Brown et al. 2001).
If the authentic may be defined as that which truly is what it purports to be, then the question of authenticity can be raised in relation to anything that purports to be anything. The term “authentic performance practice” commonly refers to a particular practical approach that is found in the performing arts, one that purports to apply results derived from the academic discipline of performance practice. The question of what practices are authentic arises in all the performing arts (Young 2005: 501); but this chapter will focus on music.
The 1960s saw the rise of certain practices in the performance of Western classical music that claimed the status of authentic performance practice. These practices were generally known under the title of the Early Music Movement – and initially they did have something of the character of a protest movement (Haynes 2007: 41). The movement arose as a reaction against the ways in which music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been played in the first half of the twentieth century, when it was given in concert performance on modern instruments, often in arrangements adapted to the sonority of those instruments or in creative transcriptions. These ways of playing music from earlier times left some practitioners feeling aesthetically dissatisfied, and they began looking for alternative ways of playing the music (Young 2005: 501). They quickly found that the music sounded very different when played on the kind of instruments for which it had originally been conceived. Inspired by initial successes, enthusiasts extended this general approach to the music of the Classical and Romantic periods.
Present-day advocates of authentic performance practice are reluctant to use the term “authentic” and the label “Early Music Movement,” preferring the banner “Historically informed/inspired performance, or HIP” (Haynes 2007). James O. Young conjectures that this reluctance is the product of two considerations. On the one hand, practitioners in pursuit of authenticity may have become concerned that the goal was unachievable (though Young himself thinks that such a concern would be misplaced). On the other hand, the practitioners may have become increasingly aware that what they were doing was actually falling short of the ideal authenticity that they espoused (Young 2005: 510).
Thanks to the movement’s commercial success, support for the pursuit of authenticity has grown in some quarters, as has hostility in others. Arguably, the practices against which the Early Music Movement reacted occurred, and achieved success with audiences, only because the original instrumental specifications for this music had been forgotten, or (where they were known) performers and audiences felt free to disregard them. In other words, the original prescriptions for the performance of this music had to some extent lost their authority: they no longer commanded respect. Thus authentic performance practice can be seen through a political lens as a restoration of lost authority – which may explain why it excites both partisanship and hostility.
There are two main areas of philosophical interest concerning authentic performance practice. First, there are philosophical analyses of various concepts that have been claimed to play a guiding role in these practices. Second, there are questions of ideology and value: to what extent have various concepts of authenticity actually played a role in performance practice, and what has been the value that authentic performance practice has contributed to contemporary culture?
One can distinguish two broad classes of meaning that the word “authenticity” carries in relation to performance. In the first class of meanings, authenticity is judged in relation to a musical work, its sounds, or the intentions behind it. In the other class of meanings, authenticity is judged in relation to a person or culture.
For Stephen Davies, authenticity concerns fidelity to works. “Authenticity is a matter of ontology rather than interpretation. An ideally authentic instance of a musical work is one that faithfully reproduces the work’s constitutive properties,” that is, one in which the performers successfully follow the work-determinative instructions of the composer (Davies 2001: 212–13, 227). He understands these instructions to go beyond what is explicitly notated in scores of the work, but to include only what is relevant to the work itself and not merely social conventions. In order to find out what a work’s constitutive properties are, therefore, we may need to make use of the academic discipline of performance practice.
When Davies says that ideal authenticity is not a matter of interpretation, he does not mean to deny that in preparing a performance aiming at authenticity one has to interpret various things. In applying the discipline of performance practice to a particular planned performance, performers inevitably have to interpret the evidence on which they rely, just as they inevitably have to interpret the scores they use. Nor does he mean to deny that someone may choose to perform a work with less than ideal authenticity; for example, by making cuts or other alterations or additions by way of interpreting what is contained in the work. He is saying that to deliver an ideally authentic performance of the work (i.e. a performance that at least reproduces all of the work’s constitutive properties), as such, is not to make a performative interpretation of the work: it is simply to perform the work in the prescribed way.
Doing what is required by the work’s determinative prescriptions does not mean doing nothing else. In particular, it does not exclude the practice of performative interpretation whereby performers bring to their realization of the work their own individual ways of executing what the work prescribes, or their own ways of supplementing what the work prescribes, without coming into conflict with the work’s requirements. So, authenticity in Davies’s sense is not incompatible with performative interpretation (Davies and Sadie 2001). But Davies expressly claims that what is authentic about a performance and what is interpretive about it are disjoint classes (Davies 2001: 209). Against this, some philosophers argue that authenticity itself is an interpretive choice – one among many. Both sides are right, relative to different objects of interpretation. A score admits of authentic or non-authentic interpretations; a work does not, according to Davies.
It follows from Davies’s analysis that authenticity is a relative concept. For example, a performance might be authentic relative to the work’s explicit prescriptions but not authentic relative to what is merely implicit. It also follows that authenticity is a matter of degree: performances may be better or worse approximations to what the work prescribes (Young 2005: 503).
Davies’s account rests on an analysis of works for performance as prescriptions for performance. If works for performance were simply abstract sound-structures, an authentic performance would be nothing more than one that produces the right sounds. Davies’s account also assumes a distinction among the prescriptions constituting a work between those that are determinative and those that are merely recommendatory. Such a distinction is actually drawn by editors and practitioners in relation to musical scores (Davies 2001: 94). Sometimes the score explicitly warrants such a distinction; for example, a passage is marked ossia, or the critical apparatus shows a traditional cut or addition as an alternative to the main text. But sometimes the score itself gives no such explicit indication. The score may contain fingerings, dynamics or phrasings without any explicit indication that they are merely recommendatory, and in some cases a critical edition of a score may show that these markings derive from the composer. Davies takes markings in these classes to be merely recommendatory even if they are sanctioned by the composer. He gives the imaginary example of a score in which the composer instructs that the work be performed only once; he observes that such an instruction would not be regarded as legitimate and thus could only be considered as a recommendation. The basis for the distinction, he says, lies in the conventions governing the score and the performance practices contemporaneous with the score (Davies 2001: 106, 141, 147). But, we do not always know exactly where to draw the boundary between a score’s determinative and merely advisory prescriptions.
Davies is perfectly consistent in denying any overlap between interpretation and authentic performance. But in order to arrive at a view of a work’s identity, much interpretation will be needed. Moreover, in the absence of decisive evidence from the discipline of performance practice, we may never be able to form a soundly based view of the work’s identity.
Some philosophers explicate the issue of authenticity in terms of fidelity to the intentions of the composer, or to the sounds of performances at the time of composition (Young 2005: 503).
To define authentic performance practice as compliance with the composer’s intentions is too broad, since composers have intentions that are not relevant to performance practice, as in the example just mentioned. Arguably, however, the composer’s relevant intentions comprise the determinative prescriptions that are enshrined in the work, plus whatever else the composer can be assumed to intend because it was an accepted convention or assumed practice at the time. But with this revision, the definition in terms of intentions takes us back to a Davies-style definition in terms of the work.
The Early Music Movement achieved widespread uptake in the recording industry, and this has led some critics to assume that authentic performance practice is simply an attempt to recreate sounds from the past. Charles Rosen regards the Early Music Movement’s concentration on the sound the composer would have heard as a mark of great progress because to concentrate on the notation would be to miss the point that the notation points to real performances. At the same time, he regards the concentration on the sound the composer actually heard as a regression because “many composers write partly with the hope of an ideal performance which transcends the pitiable means and degenerate practice they have to compromise with” (Rosen 2000: 206–13).
To define authenticity in terms of the re-creation of sounds that occurred at the time of the work’s early performances could be understood either in terms of the types of sound waves or in terms of the types of auditory experience that are presumed to have occurred at the time of those early performances. We may thus distinguish “sonic” from “sensible” authenticity (Kivy 1995: 48–50). Sensible authenticity may not be attainable given that our experience of music is shaped by experiences that earlier audiences could not have had (Young 2005: 505). Sensible authenticity may be undesirable for similar reasons as sonic authenticity: the experience of early audiences of, say, Beethoven may not be worth reliving if those audiences did not understand the music (Young 2005: 505). In either sense this definition seems too broad, since the work’s early performances may not have been any good. It seems better, with Davies, to talk about the original kind of sound under optimal conditions. But arguably, the optimal sound will be what is given in the work’s determinative prescriptions understood as including background conventions and practices; so we are back with Davies’s definition in terms of the work.
In his book Authenticities (1995), Peter Kivy devotes some analytical attention to the notion of personal authenticity, raising the question whether authenticity in this sense has anything to do with artistic performance. He argues against analyzing personal performative authenticity in terms of sincerity. Sincerity, according to him, is a feature either of emotional expression or of statements; but, he says, it is not a virtue in a performance to be an emotional expression, and performances do not make statements. Generally speaking, what he says here is true of the performance of classical instrumental music.
On the other hand, Jeanette Bicknell raises the question whether it is true of the performance of popular songs, asking “Would we not be disappointed if we learned that Paul Robeson regarded ‘Go Down, Moses’ as just a song?” (Bicknell 2005: 261). To deliver a performance that is authentic, in the sense that the feelings it expresses are sincerely felt by the performer, does not in itself amount to authentic performance practice. There may be no determinative prescription explicit or implicit in a work that mandates genuine feeling in the performer. Still, in certain cases there may be such a determinative prescription. Arguably, this is so in the case Bicknell cites, to the extent that the song “Go Down, Moses” is widely understood to implicitly prescribe a genuinely heartfelt performance.
Some writers on popular culture claim to see personal inauthenticity as playing a defining role for some performers. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor characterize Elvis Presley’s voice as an “inimitable combination of playfulness, arrogance, and desire” (2007: 148). This highly crafted mixture, they argue, actually precluded personal authenticity: “In order to make arrogance and desire palatable to American listeners, they could not be genuine; moreover, it’s difficult to be simultaneously earnest and playful” (148). In general, they argue, “rock’n’roll was at its core self-consciously inauthentic music” because it “spoke of self-invention” (149). They draw a more general conclusion:
Music can be great to listen to exactly because it is heartfelt, emotional, honest, personally or culturally revealing, and so on. It’s just that when we aggregate all these into an ideal of authenticity we can lose sight of the fact that some of the things that make us judge music as inauthentic – such as theatricality, glamour, absurdity, pointlessness, and cultural cross-pollination – can also enrich our musical experience considerably. (Barker and Taylor 2007: 336)
Or, as Theodore Gracyk puts it, “it is also important to celebrate artists whose musical performances are unlikely to be taken as authentic expressions of the singer: we need both the Bruce Springsteen model of utter sincerity and the David Bowie model of ironic play-acting” (Gracyk 2001: 216). But the quality that Bicknell expects in Robeson is not the same as the quality Barker and Taylor find in Presley. Whereas the issue there concerned Robeson’s personal beliefs and desires, it is not Elvis’s personal beliefs and desires that are in question but those of his performing persona. In other words, the question concerns what feelings and beliefs are consistently represented in his performances.
Here, one can ask whether this kind of inauthenticity in the performer’s persona amounts to authentic performance practice on the part of the performer! The suggestion is not that this is so as a general rule: in general there is no reason to assume that a work prescribes the projection of inauthenticity in the sense described. But in certain cases there may be such a determinative prescription. Arguably, this is so in the case of certain songs that Presley sings.
Kivy prefers to conceive of personal authenticity neither in terms of the performer’s genuine feelings nor in terms of the projected feelings of the performer’s persona but in terms of the achievement of a personal style and originality in performance (1995: 100–23). He argues that personal authenticity in this sense is quite compatible with authenticity regarding the composer’s intentions. (We may add that it is compatible with work-authenticity, though it does not entail it.) But Kivy believes that personal authenticity in his sense (i.e. the development of a personal performing style) is incompatible with sonic authenticity (1995: 138–41).
This seems wrong: there is no good reason to believe that the pursuit of an authentic sound cannot be combined with the development of a performing style that is distinctive in comparison with the style of other performers who also pursue authenticity of sound. There seems to be plenty of evidence that some musicians pursuing sonic authenticity simultaneously aim at (and sometimes achieve) an original personal style. Think of the highly individual lute-styles of Hopkinson Smith and Paul O’Dette, both of whom pursue sonic authenticity. Any aim at all can take an all-consuming form and thus its actualization may become incompatible with the actualization of other aims. This is true even of personal authenticity in Kivy’s sense. In some of Glenn Gould’s more extreme performances, personal style is pursued to the exclusion of respecting the composer’s intentions. There is no necessary incompatibility between work authenticity and an individual personal performing style (Young 2005: 503).
The question of cultural authenticity in performance practice concerns the extent to which a performance practice truly reflects cultural values that it purports to reflect (Davies 2001: 202). Here, as with personal authenticity, one can distinguish the values a culture represents itself as having from those that it actually has; and correspondingly there will be two types of cultural authenticity in performance.
Do any of these philosophical concepts of authentic performance practice accurately match the expressed or implicit aims of practitioners?
Bruce Haynes has been a distinguished practitioner, and as such is able to give an insider’s view of the Early Music Movement. In recounting its history, Haynes shows that in the 1960s practitioners had an ideology of replication: makers of authentic instruments wanted to replicate the original instruments they were copying, and the performers wanted to replicate early performances (Haynes 2007: 140–1). An ideology of replication leaves no room for interpretation; and yet interpretation is a necessity, in instrument-building as much as in performance. Richard Taruskin had already pointed to the influence of Modernist style on “period” performances from the 1960s (Taruskin 1995: 136, 168). He had talked about the “straight” style, and he had decried the Early Music Movement as “a branch office of modernism” (Taruskin 1995: 13). Haynes acknowledges these criticisms.
But as time passed, musicians proposed “the performance of a piece in the style of its original time” (Haynes 2007: 75), thus acknowledging the necessity for interpretation in playing old music. Haynes contrasts both Romantic and Modern styles with what he calls Rhetorical style. Haynes gives rich descriptions of Romantic, Modern, and Rhetorical styles. The Modern style is characterized by its continuous vibrato, general uniformity of tempo, and its avoidance of individual expression; it is calculated to provide the listener with clear access to the work being performed. Characteristic of the Romantic style is the use of portamento, rubato, sentimentality, and uniform solemnity; here, it is harder for the listener to detach the work performed from its performative interpretation. The Rhetorical style invokes rhetorical techniques and concepts in an attempt to make the music “speak” with the accents of human utterances (Haynes 2007: 165–84). The use of the Rhetorical style provided performers with ways of introducing expression into their performances, thus escaping from the grip of the Modern style in which many of them had been educated, without relapsing into the excesses of Romantic style (Haynes 2007: 48–64).
Haynes quotes Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s sleeve-notes to his 1967 recording of Bach’s St John Passion, which portray Harnoncourt’s pioneering efforts as initiating “a process at the end of which stands a performance corresponding to the circumstances at the time of composition in every respect.” This can be read as an overblown description of an actual performance located at some distant time in the future; but it is probably better to read it (with Haynes) as an expression of 1960s idealism (Haynes 2007: 45).
By and large, the ideologies propounded by practitioners of authentic performance do not withstand philosophical scrutiny. An ideology of replication all too readily invites the criticism that authenticists are foreswearing any ambition to develop a personal style. And Harnoncourt’s vision of a future performance that resembles bygone performances in every respect raises the question of why anyone would want to repeat past fiascos. And yet, it would be churlish to hold against Monteverdi that in his Orfeo he failed to achieve the revival of the Greek theatre. Equally one should not complain against the cultural achievements of those pursuing the reinvigoration of historical performing styles that they have sometimes wildly overstated their case. It is not in their attempt to articulate their aims, but in their actual achievements that HIP’s contributions to culture reside.
One could even agree with Charles Rosen’s judgment when he finds, on the one hand, that the ideologies (he calls them philosophies) propounded by Early Music practitioners are indefensible while, on the other, he lauds their artistic successes. Rosen goes on to claim, paradoxically, that these successes have been achieved because of the flawed philosophy: “it has been by taking the indefensible ideal of authenticity seriously that our knowledge has been increased and our musical life enriched” (Rosen 2000: 221). The paradox can be resolved by remembering that it is not the function of ideologies to be good philosophy; their function is to inspire action.
What, then, has been the value that authentic performance practice has contributed to contemporary culture?
First of all, performance is a practical matter. The pursuit of authenticity in performance has turned out to be of practical value to performing artists. Early sources sometimes contain useful information not only about what effects are to be achieved but also about how to achieve them. As an example, Philip Gossett cites the case of nineteenth-century Italian operas, many of which are still performed today. Before the twentieth century, most operatic sets were based on painted backdrops placed at various “depths” in the stage. These could be quickly raised or lowered, facilitating the almost instantaneous scene-changes that many “period” operas demand. Gossett reports on a revival of Verdi’s Ernani in Modena in 1984 where set and costume designs contemporaneous with the opera’s first productions turned out to be a very practical way of making the scene changes more effective (Gossett 2006: 466–76).
But performance is an aesthetic matter, too. Seeing that the original motivation for the Early Music Movement was an aesthetic one, the movement’s success or failure ought to be judged, as Rosen implies, on aesthetic grounds. The painted backdrops that Gossett talks about could be things of great beauty, and it is in its contribution to the aesthetic experience of the contemporary world that the pursuit of authenticity has had its biggest impact. Authentic performances, at their best, have distinctive aesthetic qualities (though this is not to say that non-authentic performances of the same works do not also have their own distinctive aesthetic qualities). These qualities derive from a number of sources. First, there is the artistry of a small group of performers – true virtuosi of the Baroque violin, cello, natural trumpet, and many other “early” instruments. Then there is the singular sonority of these instruments. Finally, there are the unique aesthetic qualities of the works performed, revealed afresh. Indeed, the widespread success of authentic performance practice, in performance and through recordings, is indicative of the fact that a new musical aesthetic now stands alongside traditional performance practice. And while some audiences find one of these aesthetics musically rewarding to the exclusion of the other (some preferring their Beethoven on modern instruments, while others prefer period instruments), many listeners have found that their aesthetic experience has been enriched by the appreciation of both.
See also Appropriation and hybridity (Chapter 17), Improvisation (Chapter 6), Instrumental technology (Chapter 18), Notations (Chapter 7), Ontology (Chapter 4), Opera (Chapter 41), Performances and recordings (Chapter 8), and Style (Chapter 13).
Barker, H. and Taylor, Y. (2007) Faking it: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, New York: Norton.
Bicknell, J. (2005) “Just a Song? Exploring the Aesthetics of Popular Song Performance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63: 261–70.
Brown, H.M. et al. (2001) “Performing Practice,” in S. Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, vol. 19, London: Macmillan, pp. 349–88.
Davies, S. (2001) Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davies, S. and Sadie, S. (2001) “Interpretation,” in S. Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, vol. 12, London: Macmillan, pp. 497–9.
Gossett, P. (2006) Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gracyk, T. (2001) I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Haynes, B. (2007) The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-first Century, New York: Oxford University Press.
Kivy, P. (1995) Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rosen, C. (2000) Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Taruskin, R. (1995) Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, J.O. (2005) “Authenticity in Performance,” in B. Gaut and D. Lopes (eds) The Rout-ledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, pp. 501–12.