74 performance and the classical paradigm
“historical performance” movement has sought to present musical works in
ways that are authentic given their provenance. As we shall see, there are
different views as to what authenticity involves and the more general goals
it is intended to serve. Among those who have questioned the coherence or
the desirability of pursuing authenticity in these various senses, Peter Kivy
has given the most extended critical treatment of these issues, and we shall
consider a number of his arguments below. How we assess these arguments
will depend, unsurprisingly, upon what we take to be the more general goals
of performance in the performing arts.
While authenticity in musical performance is usually a matter of being
true to the work, authenticity can also be construed in terms of the per-
former’s performing the work in a way that is true to herself.^5 The kinds
of constraints placed upon performers by the demand that they be true
to the work might be thought to militate against “personal” authenticity
in performance, and thereby to threaten a central value in our appre-
ciation of performances of performable works. In considering this claim
later in the chapter, I shall prefigure questions concerning the artistic
value of performances considered in themselves, to which I shall return
in Chapter 7.
3 Three Notions of Historically Authentic Performance
There are at least three ways in which we might understand the idea of a
performance being historically true to a performable work.^6 First, we might
think of the work as being tied in some essential way to its composer. A true
performance of a work will then be one that presents it in the way that the
composer intended it to be performed. Second, we might think of the work
as tied in some essential way to a particular kind of historically situated sound
sequence , whether construed in a pure or a timbral fashion. A true perform-
ance will then be one that reproduces the sound sequence of a performance
of some kind. Finally, we might think of the work as tied in some essential
way to the performance practices in place at the time the work was composed.
A true performance will then be one that complies with those practices. This
might involve not only respect for period ways of understanding the com-
poser’s explicit prescriptions, as just discussed, but also the use of period
instruments or locations, or even replication of the dress or decorum of a
period performance. These three ways of conceiving the historical authen-
ticity of a performance are closely connected. A natural way to reproduce
the sound of a period performance, for example, is to perform the work on
period instruments in a location having the same acoustic properties as the