Philosophy of the Performing Arts

authenticity in musical performance 75
performance spaces in which it would originally have been performed. Or,
it might be said, in judging which period performances we should try to
sonically replicate, we should appeal to the composer’s intentions as to how
and where her composition should be played.
Authenticity defined in terms of the composer’s intentions
According to the first conception of authenticity, an authentic performance
is one which performs a piece in the way in which its composer intended
that it be performed. This prima facie plausible conception of authenticity
is open to a number of serious objections, however. In the first place, if
performers are to act on the exhortation to perform pieces authentically,
we must anchor talk of the composer’s performative intentions in acces-
sible indicators of those intentions. The most obvious resource here is the
score, where we have a scored work. We might also take the absence of any
indication that the composer resisted the general performance practices of
her time as evidence that she intended her score to be interpreted in light
of those practices, or, at least, was happy for it to be so interpreted. And we
might have other sources of evidence, in journals, letters, and other works
by the composer, as to his or her intentions for the performance of a given
work. The difficulty, however, set out by Randall Dipert (1980) in a much
cited paper,^7 is that a composer has different kinds of intentions as to how
a given work should be performed, and it may be impossible to realize all
of those intentions at the same time in a modern “historically authentic”
performance of the piece.
Dipert distinguishes three different levels of composer intentions regard-
ing the realization of the score in performance. First, low level intentions relate
to the manner in which the prescribed sound sequence should be produced –
which instruments, played in which manner. Second, medium level intentions
concern the qualities of the sounds to be produced, such as “ temperament,
timbre, attack, pitch, and vibrato.” And third, high level intentions relate to
the effects that the performance is to produce in the listener. The problem
is that, when we attempt to perform the work for a modern audience in a
manner that is authentic in relation to the composer’s intentions, we may
not be able to jointly satisfy the low level and the high level intentions. For
the effect on a modern audience of the sounds produced by playing certain
instruments in a certain manner may be very different from the effect of such
sounds on a period audience. Dipert cites, as an example, the use of the clar-
inet by Gluck to startle an audience by its unfamiliar timbre. For a modern
audience, fulfilling the lower level intention – that a clarinet be used – will
not fulfill the higher level one – that the audience be startled – because we
are familiar with the clarinet sound. Dipert maintains that a composer’s high