The Short

4 INTRODUCTION
the notation by employing some degree of rhythmic distortion, expressive phrasing, supplementary dynamics, and
accentuation, along with other elements that have, to a greater or lesser extent, always been a feature of musicianly
performance.
Having approached as closely as possible an understanding of what the composer envisaged, therefore, we will still be
left with a broad area in which the interpretative skill of the performer would have been expected to operate. Many
composers are known to have valued a considerable degree of interpretative freedom on the part of the performer.
Indeed, to a large extent the core of the music remains undisturbed by differences of taste and temperament among
accomplished musicians even when these result in performances that would have seemed unfamiliar to the composer.
It is almost axiomatic that attempting self-consciously to preserve the stylistic peculiarities of past generations or
particular performers, even where such things are theoretically reproducible (for instance, by slavish imitation of old
recordings), is a path towards creative stagnation. But to regard all investigation of the relationship between a
composer's notation and the artistic assumptions that may lie behind it as irrelevant to performance of the music is as
perverse and one-sided as to quest for the chimera of authenticity. There can be little dispute that the more performers
understand about the possible implications of the notation before them the more likely they are to render the music
with intelligence, insight, and stylistic conviction; yet it is remarkable how little emphasis is placed on this approach in
the vast majority of conservatoires, colleges, and universities.
Understanding the notation is not merely a matter of having an uncorrupted text of the composer's most complete
version of a work. Although, in most cases, it is likely to be desirable to take an urtext as a starting-point, too great a
reliance on such ‘pure’ texts creates its own dangers. The publication of durchgesehene kritische Gesamtausgaben (revised
critical complete editions) in the second half of the nineteenth century sowed the seeds of a tendency which has
achieved its full flowering in the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the counter-currents of heavily edited
‘classics’ from Ferdinand David and Hugo Riemann in the nineteenth century to Carl Flesch, Arthur Schnabel, and
many others in the twentieth century, the cult of the urtext has grown slowly but steadily until many modern musicians,
including advocates of period performance, have invested these editions with a mysterious, almost sacrosanct quality,
as if the more literally the notes, phrasings, dynamics, and so on, which constitute the composer's latest ascertainable
version of the work, are rendered, the closer the performance will be to the ideal imagined by the composer. Research
into Baroque performing practice has led to a general recognition that this is not true of music from that period, yet
there are still many professional musicians who believe that, from the Classical period nwards, different criteria should
be applied: not a slur more nor less, a