Philosophy of the Performing Arts

78 performance and the classical paradigm
specified had other resources been available. The concern, in other words, is
with the composer’s realized intentions as represented by particular sound
sequences. It is not with intentions more abstractly conceived that might
be realized in different ways in different musico-historical contexts. He
summarizes his view as follows:
A performance will be more rather than less authentic if it successfully (re)
creates the sound of a performance of the work in question as it could be
given by good musicians playing good instruments under good conditions (of
rehearsal time, etc.), where “good” is relativized to the best of what was
known by the composer to be available at the time, whether or not those
resources were available for the composer’s use. (S. Davies 1987, 45)
Critics, however, have argued that there is an ambiguity in talk of “recre-
ating the sound” of an ideal performance of the work. They have further
maintained that, on either of two interpretations that we might give to such
talk, it fails to provide a goal for performances of musical works that is both
feasible and desirable. James Young (1988) expresses this in terms of a dis-
tinction between what is heard objectively and what is heard subjectively. The
former is a matter of the acoustic information presented to the ear, the per-
turbations of air described in physical terms. The latter, on the other hand,
is a matter of how we perceptually experience what is objectively there to be
heard, what the latter is “heard as.” It might be possible to recreate the sound
of an ideal performance in the objective sense, given sufficient musicological
research. But, Young maintains, it is unclear why this would be a desirable
goal for performance. On the other hand, to recreate the sound of an ideal
performance in the subjective sense is neither possible nor desirable. It isn’t
possible because how a listener hears (subjectively) an objectively character-
ized acoustic signal depends upon active interpretation of that signal by the
brain, where this is a function of, inter alia, the listener’s musical history. But
our musical histories, which include hearing much music written after the
composition of early musical works, differ radically from those of period lis-
teners. So, as a consequence, our subjective hearings of what is, objectively,
the same acoustic signal will also differ from how period listeners heard it.
For example, we may differ in our judgments as to whether an interval is
consonant or dissonant.^11 Or, to recall our earlier discussion, we may not
share the period listener’s experience of the sound of the clarinet in Gluck’s
piece as startling. Nor, Young claims, would it be desirable to hear musical
works in the ways that period listeners would have heard them, since much
great music is not understood by contemporaries of the composer.
Kivy draws a similar distinction between what he terms “sonic authenticity”
and “sensible authenticity” (1995, 48–53). He argues that the rationale for the