florida state university college of music performance practice

Butt credits Taruskin as one of the first to use the term postmodernism in music circles
and summarizes that Taruskin defines it as challenging the status quo of reliance of
authority over personal expression. 134 However, Butt questions the logical sequence of
Taruskin‟s argument in his Text and Act as follows: Authenticity is not being historically
accurate or restoring a work to its original performance, rather authenticity is being a
voice true to the times. The obsession of historical performance in the twentieth century
is a symptom of modern values, not of the past, and to that end, authenticity is a true
reflection, a true voice, of modernism. However, in his book Taruskin vilifies the
modernist view and recommends postmodernism to cure all that is wrong. “Now he must
mean either that modernism is, in fact, not the voice of the times, or (probably closer) that
postmodernism should be the voice of the times; this would seem to generate an
authenticity more by edict than description.” 135 John Butt, in his book, Playing with
History (2002) presents an excellent and thought-provoking argument that illustrates the
complexity of narrowingly defining modernism and postmodernism as well as providing
a view of the HIP movement since Taruskin‟s debut as HIP‟s bête noire.
Uri Golomb, a former doctoral student of John Butt, contests the view that Taruskin
and others have had since the 1980s concerning Early Music as monolithic, restrictive
and depersonalized. Golomb claims that Taruskin and his followers choose to ignore that
the Early Music establishment, and the performances it provides, represents diversity,
variety and instead of sterile performances, are laden with rich expression. 136 In addition,
Golomb states that an account that is more comprehensive and broader in scope
concerning the history of Early Music is required rather than the narrow period that
virtually ignores events and personalities outside the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. 137 The continual obsession with retrieving material resources (concerning
historical evidence of performance practice) is valued more than attempts to perform
early music in a historical-informed manner, and truly acknowledges it as a contemporary
endeavor set in a contemporary context. The comprehensive view espoused by Golomb
134 Butt, “Acting up a text,” 328.
135 Butt, “Acting up a text,”: 331.
136 Uri Golomb, “Modernism, Rhetoric and (De-) Personalisation in the Early Music Movement” (Seminar
paper presented King‟s College London, August 1998).
137 Ibid.
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