authenticity in musical performance 85
way, their performances can exhibit freedom, creativity, and other perfor-
mative values. Thus there is no obstacle to our treating historically authentic
performances by such accomplished performers as works of art, if we are
inclined to view performances as works of art in the first place. Nor is there
a problem in reconciling personal authenticity with historical authenticity.
Artists of all stripes can manifest personal authenticity within the constraints
of a chosen artistic discipline or practice. We don’t think that the sonneteer
denies herself the chance of personal authenticity in her work by opting to
work in this form rather than in free verse, for example.
In conclusion, we may note one consequence of the contextualist or instru-
mentalist defense of authentic performance that we have presented. If we do
insist on the importance of historically authentic performance for the apprecia-
tion of at least some performable works, can we reasonably claim to be in a posi-
tion to appreciate those musical works of which we have heard performances?
The vast majority of such performances, after all, are surely not authentic,
or even, strictly speaking, correct. One option might be to defend the artis-
tic relevance of authenticity without insisting on the need for authenticity in
actual performances. For, it might be said, the requirements of authentic (and,
indeed, correct) performance serve as a standard for judging whether qualities
of an actual performance can be referred to a performable work. What matters
is whether a given quality in a particular performance of a work would , or could ,
be a quality of a hypothetical authentic performance of that work.^13
But whether authentic performance can generally serve as such a standard
is questionable. How, for example, am I to know whether qualities experi-
enced in listening to a non-authentic performance – in St. Paul’s Cathedral,
for example – of a work composed for performance in San Marco would be
present in an authentic performance unless I have heard the work authenti-
cally performed in San Marco? The defender of a contextualist or instru-
mentalist conception of the performable work must, I think, bite the bullet
here and grant the imperfections in our appreciative understanding of musi-
cal works from which we are historically distanced. The contextualist will
lament this fact, but will not be moved to revise her theory. For it is simply a
consequence of the contextualized nature of what we are trying to appreci-
ate, given the context in which we ourselves are operating.
Notes
- See S. Davies 2001, 110–111, on the two kinds of interpretation required for
the performance of a scored performable work. - For a more extended discussion of these matters, see S. Davies 2001,
103–107.