florida state university college of music performance practice

are of the opinion that the Early Music Movement‟s raison d’être is less about historical
correctness and more à la mode or reflective of contemporary objectivist values.
So is Early Music just a hoax? Not at all. It is authentic indeed, far more authentic
than its practitioners contend, perhaps more authentic than they know. Why?
Because, as we are all secretly aware, what we call historical performance is the
sound of now, not then. It derives its authenticity not from historical
verisimilitude, but from its being for better or worse a true mirror of late-twentieth
century taste. Being the true voice of one‟s time is (as Shaw might have said)
roughly forty thousand times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of
history. To be the expressive medium of one‟s own age is…a far worthier aim
than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but perceived
correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand
of students, not artists. 128
The decade of the 1990s brought about a plethora of books and essays that
debated and contested matters of authenticity and philosophical justifications for
performance practice. Particularly potent for early music criticism was the jubilee year of
1995 that witnessed the publication of Richard Taruskin‟s Text and Act, and Peter Kivy‟s
Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Refer to the following
bibliography that provides corroboration of how thriving the literature was concerning
the early music movement either directly or indirectly.
Peter Kivy‟s 1995, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical
Performance acquiesces that there is not one singular authenticity, rather proposes there
are four. The “composer authenticity” is preoccupied with the composer‟s original vision
of the work; second, the “sonic authenticity” is concerned with reconstructing the
physical materials available that the composer would have employed, i.e. instruments and
venue; third, “personal authenticity” places importance on the performer‟s artistic
decisions concerning expression and interpretation; and lastly, “sensible authenticity”
ponders meaning that an audience derives from a performance. 129 Roland Jackson offers
a reductionist view of Kivy‟s list into: one, performance practice (encompassing
composer and sonic authenticity), and two, mainstream (entailing personal and sensible
128 Taruskin, Text and Act, 166.
129 Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1995).
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