Reflections of an American Harpsichordist Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick

164 ❧ chapter sixteen
The most signifi cant developments between 1939 and 1945 probably took
place in the United States. The arrival in the 1930s of innumerable gifted
refugees coincided with an unprecedented cultural awakening in the United
States and made possible in all domains of music such a fl owering as had never
taken place before. By 1940 or shortly thereafter, music assumed the place in
the minds and activities of the average cultivated American that literature and
visual arts had already won.
After about 1946 or 1947, it no longer seemed necessary to defend eigh-
teenth-century music against that of the nineteenth century. Romanticism
appeared to be defi nitely dead. Spontaneous choices went in the most aston-
ishing way toward some of the most abstruse works of Bach. It was clear that
the postwar generation felt a much greater need for reevaluation and re-
interpretation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than had previ-
ously been felt.
Many of the private virtues have now passed into public hands. The knowl-
edge and scholarship held and practiced previously only by a few has been
given wide dissemination, and one senses everywhere the curiosity about early
music and a vastly improved sense of style. The level of instrumental playing
has risen immensely; it has become possible more easily to fi nd housebro-
ken string players, and singers capable of a genuine trill. A new generation
matured that was intensely interested in the repossession of the Western cul-
tural heritage.
Just as the recording industry with the short-playing record had given an
enormous boost to early music, so the advent of the long-playing record helped
to clinch the victory. Since then, everything that appears to be worth playing,
and much besides, has been recorded in one way or another, often long before
it has ever been published. The road from the fi rst revivals of musical schol-
arship and from the beginning of the Bach-Gesellschaft in 1850 has indeed
stretched over an extensive territory. In the fl ood tide of unqualifi ed victory of
early music, public and private virtues and vices have merged in such manifes-
tations as usually accompany victory, in richness of released resources, pillage
and profi teering, famine and satiety, rape and prostitution, exuberance, and
all sorts of camp followers.
But we now fi nd ourselves in a time of unprecedented possibilities of per-
formance, both in terms of available texts, instruments, and competent execu-
tants, in a manner in which thirty years ago one had hardly dared hope. We
have, on the other hand, a distressing accumulation of all the bad features
that usually come with the good in any cultural manifestation. Probably more
worthless or mediocre music has been revived than really good music, and
much of it has obviously been dug up for the purpose of providing fodder
for graduate students. The arrogance and smugness of authorities on per-
formance practice knows no bounds. Half-knowledge backed up by neither
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