No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
In the last twenty-five years, the historical authenticity movement has changed the face of performance in classical music.1 Performances on archaic instruments, with performers striving to realize the composer's intentions and expectations regarding performing style (often by adopting styles known to be current at the time of composition), constitute an appreciable proportion of top-level performances of baroque and earlier music and a nonnegligible fraction of performances of later music. The movement arrived on a wave of intemperate advocacy and stimulated similarly intemperate opposition. Now that it has become clear that the movement's favored approaches to performance are here to stay but will not crowd out other approaches, the rhetoric has moderated, and it is widely agreed that the influence of the movement has, all in all, made the world a better place. But if it is widely agreed that there are many excellent historically authentic performances, there remains considerable scepticism about whether what is good about such performances has much to do with their adherence to composers' intentions or expectations or with their use of period instruments, styles, and practices. Indeed, a recent book by Peter Kivy is largely devoted to attacking the claim that historical authenticity per se is a source of aesthetic good.2 To some extent, such scepticism is a salutary response to continued hype in favor of historical authenticity.3 Still, there are babies in danger of being thrown out with this particular bathwater. A great virtue of Kivy's discussion is that he assesses the value of historical authenticity in the context of a very helpful characterization of the art of performing others' compositions. But closer attention to that very characterization will
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.