the performance of “early music” ❧ 165
sensibility nor common sense pervades the world of early music, and every-
where we see the tendency to resort in courses on performance practice, and
indeed in performances themselves, to a kind of mass-produced instant style
that resembles very much the mass-produced “colonial” decorative objects that
now disfi gure most New England towns.
Much of this is made possible by a certain literal mindedness on the part of
scholars and devotees of early music. Because it began in a crusade, early music
retains a sinister attachment to names and concepts. It suffi ces to use an instru-
ment that bears the name of a respectable old instrument like a harpsichord
or a viola da gamba, no matter how lacking the instrument may be in physical
authenticity or the player in competence. Its supposed respectability is elevated
above what would sound far better on the cello or on the piano in the hands
of a competent performer. Situations constantly arise in which one is put in
the position of producing something which is artistically inadequate because
one is still operating in the interests of the crusade for early music. I look back
myself on a guilt-ridden past in which, with a perfectly good Steinway standing
right on the same stage, I have played the most incredibly awful harpsichords,
simply because I was committed not to music but to the harpsichord. In what
form I will expiate this, I mercifully do not yet know. Furthermore, I blush to
think of the number of inaudible performances of Bach harpsichord concer-
tos I have played. One of the problems with the commitment to early music is
the diffi culty of crossing the borderline from propaganda to common sense.
Daily one witnesses such anachronisms as demonstrations of a three-hun-
dred-year range of keyboard music on late eighteenth-century harpsichords
because they happen to be the only ones that work, or for that matter, demon-
strations of early keyboard music on modern harpsichords that have absolutely
nothing to do with harpsichords of any period prior to 1889. Of this kind of
thing, I have been as guilty as anyone else.
The regrettable literal-mindedness of the world of early music manifested
itself the other day in a tape sent from Germany by a prospective pupil. I imme-
diately recognized a perfect embodiment of current German principles of
“Aufführungspraxis”^2 as applied to Couperin. If one had wished to make a car-
icature, one could not have done better. But I am sure that this performance
was perpetrated with the greatest feeling of self-righteousness and dedication.
Of artistic value there was nothing. It was a mere aggregation of details of con-
cepts. But such an aggregation of details, like the few remaining ruins in an
archaeological dig, often serve for the specious reconstruction of an alleged
historical and artistic whole. The world of early music is much more concerned
with styles than with style, and confused by its mixture of propaganda and
polemic with aspirations to art.
- Performance practice.
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