Philosophy of the Performing Arts

authenticity in musical performance 83
1990a, 395). He further relates this to the idea that “expressive content in
music ... is centrally predicated on the construability of musical gestures as
akin to, or as relatable to, human behavorial expressions of emotion” (398).^12
He offers a number of examples of this phenomenon. A rapid upward glis-
sando in keyboard music often conveys a sense of momentary abandon, and
this is grounded in our awareness of the kind of physical interaction with the
keyboard required to produce such a sound. And it is in virtue of the sorts
of movements that a cellist will make in rendering certain passages that we
hear those passages as having a caressing quality. Where period instruments
are used in performance, our awareness of the ways in which these instru-
ments differ from their modern counterparts in physical construction and
mode of operation and, as a result, differ in their sonic capacity , may affect
their gestural potential, and thus their expressive meaning, even if, in some
cases, they produce identical sounds to the modern equivalents.
If Young and Kivy are right about the gap between sonic and sensible authen-
ticity, then some of the expressive properties to which Levinson alludes may
not be directly available to us. But authentic performance may still increase
our understanding of the expressive qualities those works must have had for
a contemporary audience, if, as Davies suggests, such understanding does not
require that we simulate period experience in all respects. In the same way,
pace Kivy, our failure to experience surprise or shock in hearing the opening
measures of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 does not negate the importance of
hearing those measures played as Beethoven prescribed, for we can thereby
better understand how those measures would have struck his contemporar-
ies. More generally, it seems that, if we are swayed by arguments for contex-
tualist or instrumentalist conceptions of the musical work, we can accord a
role to authentic performance, understood in terms of conformity to period
performance practice, in the appreciative understanding of musical works.
This is not to argue that only performances of musical works that are
authentic in this sense are of value, or that a performer is under an obliga-
tion to perform works in this way. But it is to suggest that, the further our
conception of musical works departs from pure sonicism, the more value
historically authentic performances can have for our appreciative under-
standing of performable works as the particular works that they are. But
this raises a consideration to which we alluded earlier. Will there not be
a tension between the demands placed on a performer by the task of per-
forming a work authentically in the above sense and the performer’s desire
for personal authenticity in her playing? Kivy raises this concern (1995,
271–286). He argues that the more we insist upon the historical authentic-
ity of performance, the more we restrict the personal authenticity of the
performer. Indeed, he claims, a primary motivation for the historical per-
formance movement is a desire to eliminate the gap between the “text,”