musical performance practice” and tries to impose “system and order” on the
issue, with the aim of laying the “groundwork for future dialogue.” In doing
so, he brings up key questions: Why perform according to the supposed inten-
tions of the composer at all? Why not let musicology establish musical texts,
without the need to perform them? “An authentic performance continually
and persistently draws attention to itself, to the medium: relatively transparent
to its contemporaries, relatively opaque to us.” “Historical authenticity should
not... be pursued doggedly and single-mindedly to the end of collapsing per-
formance into text.” Bibliography, index.- Taruskin, Richard. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance.New
York: Oxford U.P., 1995. 382p. ISBN 0-19-509437-9. ML157 .T37.
One of the 20 essays (published 1972–1994) in this volume had appeared in
the New York Times(29 July 1990), attracting much attention for its critique
of the authenticity movement. Taruskin holds that historical performance is in
fact a creation of the present, based on contemporary aesthetic views. There is
no definitive text, as Howard Mayer Brown (#331) and most other musicolo-
gists claim. Authenticity means that performers must be true to themselves, as
well as to the composer. - Mertin, Josef. Early Music: Approaches to Performance Practice.Trans. Sieg-
mund Levarie. New York: Da Capo, 1986. xv, 204p. ML457 .M4613.
Originally Alte Musik: Wege zur Aufführungspraxis (Vienna: Lafite, 1978). In
the translator’s words, a “highly subjective” approach to early music; Mertin,
a conductor and organ builder as well as a musicologist, was a pioneer in the
revival of baroque, renaissance, and medieval music. He believed that musical
sense is a more reliable guide to historical performance than treatises and other
documentation. But he was well aware of the research on authenticity, weav-
ing it into his own presentation of “what a conductor must know” about nota-
tion, rhythm and meter, musical structures, sonorities, thorough bass, old
instruments, and tuning/tempering of the organ and continuo instruments. He
hoped to free musicians “from performance conditions of 1910, which con-
tinue to dominate the concert stage.” The last chapter provides “analytic sup-
port for a practical performance” of Bach’s Magnificat. Backnotes but no
bibliography or index. - The journals Historical Performance (1988–) and Performance Practice
Review(1988–1997) present further research and opinion in this controversial
field. The Reviewhas been replaced with an online Performance Practice
Encyclopedia,<www.performancepractice.com>.
Editing
340.NGDO 2, 11–16, “Editing,” by Ellen Rosand, Stanley Sadie, and Roger
Parker, is a fine summary of the problems encountered in reconstructing old
scores.72 Opera