Against Personal Authenticity

For a musician to perform a work with personal authenticity is for her performance to be faithful to her musical personality: her musical tastes, values, and ideals. Contra Peter Kivy, this chapter argues that such authenticity is not a performance value within Western classical music: a performance is not better for being more personally authentic, other things being equal. In examining our critical practice and, especially, the work of great performers such as Alfred Brendel, Dinu Lipatti, and Mitsuko Uchida, it becomes clear that performers are most in tune with the norms governing work performance when they give themselves over to the work itself. In doing this, a performer deploys her musical personality, not as something to which her performance is supposed to be faithful, but as a conduit to performing the work with understanding. A performer’s musical personality, functioning properly in performance, determines a route to the work’s meaning.

Afterword

In this brief Afterword the author addresses the question of whether the picture of work performance recommended here is consistent with the ontological proposal for musical works elaborated and defended in his Works of Music (2007). It might be supposed that there is an irresolvable tension between that book’s account of musical works—as sempiternally existent, temporally and modally inflexible entities, individuated purely in terms of how they sound—and the claims made here about the norms governing our practice of work performance. Carefully distinguishing evaluative questions from ontological ones, the sources of this suspicion are brought out into the open and dispatched.

Meaning, Understanding, and Interpretive Authenticity

Interpretive authenticity now takes centre stage. A performance of a work is interpretively authentic to the extent that it evinces understanding of the work that is insightful, profound, far-reaching, and so on. This chapter starts by outlining some of interpretive authenticity’s key features, before discharging a substantial obligation that a commitment to it incurs: in short, an obligation to say what it is for pure instrumental music to have meaning (since the meaning of such a work is simply what is there to be understood in it). Responding to Kivy’s well-known scepticism on this score, musical meaning is introduced and characterized in detail, the central thesis being that understanding a musical work lies in appreciating its point: why it unfolds in the way it does. In the course of describing further features of musical meaning, a useful analogy is proposed between understanding a piece of music and understanding a person.

Score Compliance Authenticity

Score compliance authenticity in performance is that way of being faithful to a work that consists in obeying the instructions for performing it accurately, as these are recorded in the work’s score. However, scores can be understood only if they are interpreted in light of a set of notational conventions and performance practices. This is usually taken to entail that score compliance authenticity amounts to historical authenticity: on this view, the conventions and performance practices against which scores must be read are those in place at the time of composition; and so accurate performance becomes a matter of performing the work as it would have been performed, under ideal conditions, in the composer’s own time. This historicization of score compliance authenticity is controversial, however: the conventions and practices in terms of which we interpret period scores could be those in place at the time of performance, rather than those with which the composer was familiar. Abstracting away from this issue, the chapter then makes the case that score compliance authenticity is a performance value and, indeed, one that is more fundamental than garden-variety such values. This is because it is valued in performance for its own sake.

The Normative Profile of Interpretive Authenticity

The book’s final chapter focuses squarely on interpretive authenticity’s place in our practice of work performance. It is pointed out, first, that interpretive authenticity is a performance value and, second, that, no less than score compliance, it is valued for its own sake. Crucially, however, it is argued, in addition, that interpretive authenticity is the practice of work performance’s most fundamental value. This is because interpretive authenticity, and not score compliance authenticity, is the practice’s constitutive norm: that is, it belongs to the nature of the activity of performing works of Western classical music that performances both ought to maximize, and are trying to maximize, interpretive authenticity. The chapter gives examples in which the norms of interpretive authenticity and score compliance authenticity conflict with each other. It follows from the proposed account of the practice’s normative profile that such conflict should be resolved by sacrificing textual fidelity for the sake of increasing a performance’s interpretive authenticity.

Introduction

This chapter sets the scene by introducing authenticity in performance as a way in which a performance is faithful to something. Work authenticity in performance is then characterized as faithfulness to the work. Score compliance authenticity and interpretive authenticity are then introduced as two different kinds of work authenticity. Already, merely by describing the kinds of performances that seem to matter most to us, it starts to look like it is interpretive authenticity that is work performance’s most fundamental norm. The chapter ends by laying out the structure of the book, explaining the key theses and arguments of each chapter.

Historicizing Score Compliance Authenticity

This chapter returns to an issue shelved in Chapter 2: whether we should historicize score compliance authenticity, thereby construing it as historical authenticity. An alternative, tradition-based account of score compliance is introduced, according to which we interpret the demands of such compliance in terms of the conventions and practices in place at the time of performance, not the time at which the work was composed. This is an inclusive position, in which both mainstream performance practice and historical such practice figure as stylistic options. It is argued that the tradition-based account of score compliance is preferable for two reasons: first, it grants the performer greater artistic freedom, thereby giving her a better chance of performing with the musicality, imagination, and conviction necessary to evince a profound understanding of the works performed; second, it better sits with Wittgenstein’s considerations on following a rule.