Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

style in performance ❧ 143
sense. Much has been written about purity of architectural styles, especially in
respect to classical Greek-derived architecture.
One can talk about styles in terms of national schools or in terms of the
personal idiosyncrasies of various artists, writers, or painters. One can talk
about styles in relation to periods of history. That hideous convention of the
nineteenth century, the Stilmöbel, the period furniture piece, is, of course, a
good example.
From styles we can go on to consider another quality, which we call styl-
ishness. We think of stylishness above all in clothing, in fashions. We think of
stylishness as being chic, arresting, as having a certain pronounced and easily
notable character. In its ordinary connotation, stylishness does not necessarily
run as deep as style. It is possible for a well-dressed mannequin at a showing of
haute couture to look exceedingly stylish, but it is equally possible for her to
have no style whatsoever in her way of living, thinking, or feeling. There are
those who can drape themselves in any piece of old rag and have stylishness, a
stylishness that in some cases almost amounts to style.
One might conclude that style perhaps comes from within and stylishness
from without. A further category, and certainly in no sense the highest, is the
category of stylization.
It shares the horrors of all those words that originate in making a verb out
of a noun and then converting it again into a noun. It has features in common
with “personalization” of stationery, or with the “caffeinization” of instant cof-
fee, or with the “sugarization” of artifi cial sweetening. It has all the connota-
tions of those elements that I most fl ee from in the conventional American
theater, when it is said in connection with a massacre that may have just taken
place of a comedy of Shakespeare, or worse yet of Molière, that the acting has
been “stylized.”
If we look back over these various categories, we can see that in some of
them the aspects of style are personal and originate from one individual—that
they are external manifestations of internal attributes. But there is another
kind of style, and that is style as collective, as conventional, as a product of a set
of tendencies and even of imitative behavior on the part of a group or culture.
But if we examine specifi c examples, we will surely fi nd out that it is impossible
to draw a hard and fast borderline between those elements of style which are
genuinely personal and those which are genuinely collective.
One hears talk of canons of style, of the canons of classical or Renaissance
architecture, of the golden mean, of the canons of proportion. These canons
of styles are not only collective, but they are slow-formed through the ages.
They represent a kind of an accumulated cultural heritage. But very often what
is called style is merely convention, accepted without questioning or without
any particular act of choice, just as are certain kinds of religious beliefs or
codes of behavior.
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