Philosophy of the Performing Arts

82 performance and the classical paradigm
of performative practice, would execute various passages in the score. In
such cases, he argues, we can expect that composers “respond consciously
or unconsciously to their awareness of prevailing practice in various ways.”
Only where prevailing period practice is employed in the performance of
the piece can we determine certain of its intended aesthetic values – values
not only intended by the composer but also realized when the piece is played
as he expected. This extends to the use of period instruments, where, again,
we can think of composers as “writing idiomatically for those instruments”
(Edidin 1991, 407), taking account of the strengths and limitations of the
means through which they expect their works to be realized. More gener-
ally, we may expect composers to work creatively within the constraints that
their musico-historical contexts present, thereby “making virtues of neces-
sity” (398). The contextualist, therefore, can expect that a proper inter-
rogative understanding of a given musical work will be advanced through
performances that are authentic in their employment of period instruments
and their respect for period performance practice.
This may also apply to the locations in which composers expect their
works to be performed. Both Kivy and Stephen Davies (1987, 41) cite works
of the Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli that were composed for per-
formance in San Marco, which has very distinctive acoustics. Kivy comments
that such works “must lose some palpable musical qualities, expressive ones
to a large degree, when deprived of this very special setting” (1995, 97).
To fully grasp the expressive properties of such works, then, it seems that
we must hear them performed in the architectural environment for which
they were composed, or in an environment that simulates it – the latter is
presumably impossible in practice in the case of San Marco. We need to take
account, in appreciating such works, of how the composer exploited the
situational possibilities, working creatively within external constraints.
Levinson, whose contextualism incorporates the instrumentalist’s
requirement that prescribed instruments be used in correct performances
of a work, argues that, if we are to grasp those qualities of a work that bear
upon its appreciation, it is not enough that an authentic performance sound
(objectively) the way that an (ideal) performance would sound if played on
period instruments according to period performance practice. In Davies’s
original defense of historically authentic performance, as we saw, the pri-
mary motivation for using period instruments was that only their use allows
faithful reproduction of the relevant sound qualities. Levinson, however,
insists that actual period instruments must be used if we are to realize cer-
tain representational and expressive properties of the work (see Levinson
1990a). He reiterates his more general instrumentalist claim, familiar from
Chapter 2, that “part of the expressive character of a piece of music as heard
derives from our sense of how it is being made in performance” (Levinson