Philosophy of the Performing Arts

authenticity in musical performance 81
historically authentic performance must rest upon its “aesthetic” payoff by
suggesting that the alternative would require an analysis of the musical work
which took composer’s intentions to be partly constitutive of the work
(1995, 150–151). While Kivy declines to provide an analysis of the nature
of the musical work, our present reflections suggest that some such analysis
will be necessary if we are to determine what counts as an “aesthetic payoff.”
Indeed, as we shall see, it is in terms of the instrumentalist and contextual-
ist conceptions of the musical work considered in Chapter 2 that the most
compelling defenses of authentic performance can be given.
Edidin draws a useful distinction between two kinds of evaluations that we
can make of a particular performance of a performable work (1991, 396).
On the one hand, we can treat the performance as to some extent an autono-
mous event, to be evaluated in terms of its own musical qualities and the skills
of the performer, even if we acknowledge that these qualities are realized
and these skills exercised within the performative envelope of a particular
performable work. On the other hand, we can assess the performance as a
performance of a particular performable work. Here we may compare it to
other performances of the work and relate at least some of the qualities found
in the performance to the work itself in the way discussed in the first section
of Chapter 3. The claim that performances, whether historically authentic or
not, should be held accountable to their “aesthetic payoff ” is most obviously
read as a claim about how we should assess them as autonomous events. What
we must now explore is how performances that are authentic in the third
sense might be held to be valuable as performances of a work in virtue of what
they contribute to our understanding of that work.
In Chapter 1, we saw that our appreciative interest in an artwork is always
interrogative. We seek not merely to engage with a sensible manifold but also
to understand why the manifold is ordered in the way that it is. We thereby
refer the manifold to the generative activity of the creator of the work. This
applies no less to performable works than to their performances. As we have
seen, a performable work prescribes certain things for its correct perform-
ances. But, we may ask, why does the work prescribe the particular things
that it does? If we are contextualists, we will think that at least some of these
prescribed features are to be explained in terms of the historically situated
judgments of the composer. Indeed, Kivy himself offers such an explanation
in relating Beethoven’s strategy in the opening measures of his Symphony
No. 1 to what had been done by Haydn and Mozart. But, while the expla-
nation of prescribed features of a performable work may cite the musico-
historical context in which a composer was working, it may also appeal to
aspects of period performance practice. Edidin speaks here of composers
“writing idiomatically for their performers” (1991, 405), composing in light
of how the anticipated performers, in conforming to period conventions