Philosophy of the Performing Arts

authenticity in musical performance 73
Leonardo is one from the hand of that artist (at least in its most artisti-
cally significant features). In the multiple arts, authenticity is sometimes
understood in an analogous fashion. An authentic Dürer woodcut, for
example, or an authentic print of Stieglitz’s The Steerage , also owes its authen-
ticity to its provenance, albeit in a more mediated way. Authenticity here is a
matter of standing in the right kind of causal relation to a production artifact
that was itself generated by the artist. In the performing arts, however, the
authenticity of a performance, as this is usually understood, is not a matter
of its standing in a causal relation to the activity of the artist. Rather, the rela-
tionship is a normative one, often characterized in terms of the performance’s
being “true to” the work. This highlights a necessary condition for the ques-
tion of the historical authenticity of a performance to even arise: the per-
formance must be of something to which it may be judged to be more or less
true. This “something” is normally a performable work, although it might be
an improvisational tradition if what is at issue is the historical authenticity of
a jazz performance.
To ask about a performance’s historical authenticity relative to a work,
however, also assumes a historical context – the context of composition of
the work – by reference to which we can define what it is for a perform-
ance to be true to that work. The idea of being true to a performable work
is indeed usually linked in this way to historically authentic performance.
But, more generally construed, a performance is true to a work just in case
it meets the requirements for being a correct rendering of that work. What
these requirements are, as we have seen, depends upon what we take the
work itself to be. For the contextualist, for whom the work itself is partly
constituted by its history of making, to be true to the work one must perform
it in a way that takes proper account of that history. The contextualist there-
fore naturally associates the “truth to a work” of a performance with its his-
torical authenticity in some sense. For the pure sonicist, on the other hand,
truth to a musical work is simply a matter of compliance with the sequence
of pitches, durations, etc., prescribed by the composer. Historical authentic-
ity is unlikely to be a concern.
The nature and desirability of historical authenticity in musical perform-
ance is one of the most hotly contested philosophical issues in recent years
concerning the performing arts.^4 The passionate nature of the debates surely
owes much to the fact that the question is essentially a practical one: given
a conception of what authentic performance would involve, should per-
formers pursue authenticity in their practice? As such, it has implications
for the kinds of performances one might wish or expect to see. Indeed, it
is practical developments in the performing arts that have generated most
of the recent philosophical interest in this topic. Prompted by research
by historical musicologists on performance practices in early music, the