Recordings and histories of performance style

Abstract

Introduction Recordings show us that music we think we know intimately sounded quite different in the past. When music sounds different it is different, because music's meaning depends to a very important extent on its sound. Even if you sit at home and read an orchestral score (let's assume you have exceptional powers of musical imagination), the sounds you imagine are those made by a modern orchestra playing as orchestras play today. So however you hear it, there's no experiencing music except through the way it's performed: when the performance changes, the music changes. I think we have to assume, therefore, that pieces we believe we know rather well actually felt different a hundred years ago. We can get some sense of this by reading what people thought about pieces then. Scott Messing's studies of Schubert reception give some idea of how views of him and his music have changed. I've argued in another study that we can hear these changes also in recorded performance, indeed, that in some cases it was recordings of powerful performances (those of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau especially) that shaped the things people thought and wrote about the composer, bringing to him a new seriousness and psychological depth that was not there in earlier commentary or – it would seem – for earlier listeners.

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