Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

148 ❧ chapter fourteen
needlepoint. As I looked around the room, I realized that everything in it was
authentic and priceless. Yet it added up to one of the ugliest rooms in which I
have ever spent time. I longed for a breath of air, for a release from this prison
of style. I longed to see its inhuman consistency broken by an incongruous
piece of furniture or by a sock left trailing on one of the needlepoint sofas. I
felt myself struggling like a butterfl y impaled on a pinpoint of arrested histori-
cal time.
The other interior combines three centuries of furniture and painting in
the most diverse styles, but with a complete homogeneity which derives from
the taste and discrimination of its owners. It serves as a perfect example of
taste as the consistent product of a whole series of choices and selections. This
is a far cry from that kind of imitated taste which merely accepts standards
copied from someone else. That Louis XV room with all its deadly consistency
was authentic, but nevertheless presented only an imitation of taste. This het-
erodox house with everything in it harmonizing perfectly was, of course, an
example of original and genuine taste.
Now I turn again to style in musical performance and to some of the anoma-
lies with which one is faced in coaching and teaching music. One hears a great
deal about being coached in musical style or styles. Master classes and courses
in performance practice are given to this end. Master classes in many cases are
nothing better than academies of mannerisms, and courses in performance
practice often resemble a kind of style by mail order, in the context of a set
of notions almost as primitive as those that provoke a good American house-
holder to put an eagle and the machine-made broken pediment over his front
doorway and to think that he has “colonialized” his home—that he now has
given it “style.” Since the revival of style-consciousness in music, there has been
a corresponding effl orescence of bogus mail-order style coaching and teach-
ing. People do not want to have to answer questions for themselves. They want
to have them answered. They do not want to be told about style; they want to
be told about styles.
Here are a few of the problems that present themselves in coaching and
teaching in relation to musical styles. If, for example, one is asked about Bach
style, one has the pleasure and obligation of asking in reply, “Which Bach
style?” But what can one do in a few words or a few minutes or a few days?
One can explain Bach’s relation to his instruments, one can explain certain of
the more obvious and least important aspects of so-called performance prac-
tice. One can say, “Do not make too many crescendos and diminuendos, it
is not in the style.” One can issue a whole series of prohibitions, but how can
one give the positive commands without becoming involved with those genu-
ine questions of style that lie far below the surface? If one says in connection
with an allemande, “Do not overdo the dynamics, try to make it sound like a
harpsichord or clavichord,” that is no answer whatever. The only answer lies
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