florida state university college of music performance practice

Stravinsky‟s assertions provided encouragement for those advocating for authentic
performances and later fuel for attacks denouncing authenticity, most notably by Richard
Taruskin, who names Stravinsky above others as the custodian of neo-classicism. Neo-
classicism is described by Stenzl and Zedlacher (1995) as the second interpretative
approach of music that emerged in the 1920s and thus concluded the era of laissez-faire
expressiveness. 65 The new style, whose ideology continues to govern today, dismissed
the idea of interpreting musical works but rather advocated for the “candid
communication” of those works. 66 In other words, conductors and performers should
avoid at all cost interpreting, altering or revising a musical work. Rather, strict adherence
to the written score is encouraged. The urtext ultimatum weighed heavily on many and
the enterprise of performance for several decades, and while the attacks by Taruskin and
others have mitigated its effect, continues to pervade the venture of performance today.
Princeton musicologist Arthur Mendel (1905-1979) is also credited by Richard
Taruskin as influencing countless individuals in the pursuits of truth as represented in
gathering scientific evidence over personal expressions. 67 Mendel, who had been a pupil
of Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s, was a choral conductor specializing in the music of
Bach and Schütz. 68 Taruskin portrays Mendel as a positivist authoritarian musicologist
who admonished performers, some famous like Harnoncourt, for going on “intuition” and
not exhausting all of the scientific evidence before coming to conclusive decisions. 69
Events and ideologies as discussed above regarding early music from the turn of
the century to after the Second World War must be viewed in context of a myriad of
philosophical currents that were part of the belief landscape. The chaos and brutality of
the First World World War ended the world‟s naïveté. In reaction to the chaos, many
people sought order and precision; where they found a sympathetic understanding in the
belief of modernism and positivism. Modernism, in epistemological terms, is the
conviction of breaking with traditional practices and positivism seeks authentic truth and
progress through ordered science. These obsessions decline the personal and subjective in
favor of objective scientific explanations.
65
Stenzl and Zedlacher, “In Search of a History of Musical Interpretation,” 689.
66
Ibid.
67
Richard Taruskin, Text and Act, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 146.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
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