florida state university college of music performance practice

Basiliensis located in Basel, Switzerland, was a significant endeavor because it has
focused on how to implement the theoretical aspects of performance practice.
In the latter part of that decade, several celebrated musical personalities were
publicly championing performance practice and attempting to recreate the original
conditions of particular musical compositions. Probably most well known would be Igor
Stravinsky who used educational arenas such as Harvard, as would Hindemith six years
after him, to suggest that the quest to replicate the original conditions of a musical
composition was the ethical responsibility of the performer to the composer. Strict
adherence to the written urtext score was also a premise encouraged. Musicologist Arthur
Mendel supported performers to research exhaustively evidence regarding the original
conditions concerning a particular work before realizing the work in performance.
The expressed beliefs of Stravinsky and Mendel that discouraged personal,
subjective and intuitive performances influenced and resonated with many. Circulating in
society during this time were several philosophical doctrines that provided fertile ground
for their convictions. The brutality and chaos that ensued by two World Wars and the
threat of nuclear holocaust produced a yearning for security, precision, truth and the
glories of the past. Many focused on beliefs of modernism, positivism and historicism to
escape harsh realities. Tenets of modernism reject the past, in this case the immediate
past where technology of the industrial revolution had created many evils in society, and
seek inspiration in the present. Positivism seeks truth and progress through science.
Lastly, historicism believes that true art has an enduring and timeless legacy that awaits
rediscovery.
Despite some inherent paradoxes and complications of each philosophical
doctrine, their beliefs permeated into music circles. Modernists in music rejected the
perceived excesses of the Romantic period and instead sought economical means of
expression, objective renderings and precise execution of music. Positivism in music
sought factual knowledge of early music and to scientifically prove matters of
provenance and authenticity by the dating of watermarks, papers and the like, interpreting
music through the examination of treatises and advocating for the supremacy of the urtext
edition over all other opinions. Historicism supported early music, recovering lost works,
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