style in performance ❧ 147
almost automatically guarantees certain consistency in treatment, no mat-
ter what the subject matter may be. With respect to domestic architecture, I
have often thought that people with restricted budgets did better than those
who knew no limits, simply because the restricted budget imposed a certain
economy and homogeneity of materials. If the budget is unlimited, the use of
diverse and expensive materials can exert a disruptive infl uence. Hence the
dangers of the orchestra expanded according to Stokowski’s visions, or the wel-
ter of possibilities inherent in electronic music.
As in the other arts, style takes on a totally different perspective in music
when seen from historical distance. I well remember when all music prior to
Mozart was lumped more or less into the style of “old music.” In this country it
is common to lump all sorts of artifacts under the appellation “colonial.” This
is applied on the East Coast to almost anything prior to 1850 and on the West
Coast to almost anything going as far back as 1890. Those who are closer to the
history of styles know better, but the further one gets away from the smaller dif-
ferentiations that exist within a culture or within a period, the more crude and
all-embracing the concepts of style become. Distance in time causes very much
the same effect as distance in space, and small distinctions lose themselves in a
general impression in just the same way the details of a landscape disappear in
favor of larger contours as one gains altitude in an airplane.
How much is originality essential to style? It seems to me that there are peri-
ods in which personal qualities of style are much more in evidence than in
others. Certainly this is true of the nineteenth century. It is far less true of the
eighteenth century. One man’s trio sonata or suite often strongly resembles
another man’s. In Corelli and Handel and their contemporaries, there was
much which is common property.
A problem is posed by an accretion of successive styles, as, for example, in a
European church with a Romanesque crypt, a Gothic choir, and a Renaissance
nave. And if perchance it was bombed during the last war it might now have a
glass and concrete belfry. In many cities, widely diverging styles of architecture
can be found, yet a force is present that imposes a certain consistency. It may
be the consistency of materials, of local light, or of general local topography
that fi nishes by imposing a style on things which are totally divergent. Many
of the happiest mixtures of style survive only because the nineteenth-century
restorers who were restoring everything to a consistent Gothic did not have a
chance to lay their hands on them.
Some of the best-looking interiors I have ever seen are not by any means
the most consistent in style. I think of two contrasting examples, both in Paris.
On visiting one of them for the fi rst time I had no notion what to expect. I
arrived early and had ten minutes or so to myself in the drawing room. It was
a room which impressed me as indescribably dowdy and embarrassingly nou-
veau-riche. Everything in it was in Louis XV style, every bibelot and every bit of
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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