Philosophy of the Performing Arts

84 performance and the classical paradigm
representing what the composer prescribes, and the performance of the
prescribed work (Kivy 1995, 276). As we saw earlier, one thing that dis-
tinguishes the performed arts from other multiple arts is the role of inter-
pretation in the generation of work-instances. This helps us to understand
Kivy’s observation that what is really at issue in debates over the desirability
of historically authentic performance is “whether you want the art music of
the Western historical tradition to remain a performing art or to cease to be
one” (271). What is also at issue, if Kivy is right, is whether, as he wishes to
maintain, at least some performances of performable works are works of art
in their own right. For only if we can credit features of a performance to the
exercise of creative freedom on the part of the performer can we take the
kind of interest in the performance qua performance that we have seen to
be distinctive of our interest in an artwork qua artwork.
Fortunately for the limited defense of historically authentic performance
mounted in the preceding paragraphs, we need not, in accepting this defense,
commit ourselves to the scenario that Kivy describes. We have based the case
for historical authenticity on the requirements for understanding, and thereby
properly appreciating, performable works construed as essentially contextual-
ized entities. But, in so doing, we have not foreclosed on other more traditionally
“aesthetic” values that might be sought in the performance of performable works,
even if such performances fail to be work-instances, in the technical sense. A
performer seeking to increase the Kivian “aesthetic payoff ” of her performance
might ignore considerations of authenticity and even depart in certain respects
from the score while still succeeding in producing a performance of a given
work. We might value such a performance, which is of the work, as an autono-
mous event while not valuing it as a performance of the work performed, taking
it to provide very little appreciative insight into, or understanding of, the latter.
But more crucially, why think that there cannot be an exercise of personal
authenticity in historically authentic performances of period performable
works, if, as Kivy rightly holds, those works were generally intended by their
composers as proper subjects for interpretation by performers? For surely
performers contemporary with the composer of a period piece were able to
exercise their own creative freedom in performing those works. Many dif-
ferent interpretations fall within the performative envelope furnished by the
explicit prescriptions and implicit understandings of the composer. A modern
performer or ensemble seeking to provide an authentic performance of such
a work has, in principle, exactly the same range of interpretive possibilities
as period players. The difference lies in the accessibility of possibilities within
that range. Only through dedication to exploring the potentialities of period
instruments and period performative practice will modern performers come
to realize the interpretive possibilities of the work taken as the historical
individual that it is. But, when modern players dedicate themselves in this