6

The Modern Sound of Early Music

What does Early Music have to do with history? In theory, everything.

In fact, very little. At the beginning, the movement was frankly
antiquariana matter of reviving forgotten repertories and, with
them, forgotten instruments and performing practices. Nobody ob-
jected to that, nor did most musicians even pay much attention to it.
Now, it seems, Early Musickers are performing almost everything.
They have laid claim to the standard repertory, and attention must be
paid. More than that, sides are takenthe movement in its present
phase has become controversial.
But on closer inspection, it becomes ever more apparent that
"historical" performers who aim "to get to 'the truth'" (as the forte-
pianist Malcolm Bilson has put it) by using period instruments
and reviving lost playing techniques actually pick and choose from
history's wares. And they do so in a manner that says more about
the values of the late twentieth century than about those of any
earlier era.
Whatever the movement's aims or claims, absolutely no one
performs pre-twentieth-century music as it would have been per-
formed when new. This may be so easily verified that it is a wonder
anyone still believes the contrary. Some examples:
Frans Bruggen, appearing with his Orchestra of the 18th Cen-
tury at Zellerbach Hall on the campus of the University of California
at Berkeley, tells the audience during an intermission feature at the
open dress rehearsal that the purpose of his enterprise is "to be
obedient to the composer." He then conducts a performance of Bee-
thoven's "Eroica" Symphony in which the composer's meticulously
indicated tempos are all ignored.

Originally published as "The Spin Doctors of Early Music" in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday
New York Times, 29 July 1990. Reprinted by permission of the New York Times.

164
The Modern Sound of Early Music 16 5

Roger Norrington launches a meteoric career as "historical"

performer of the standard classical repertory with a cycle of Bee-
thoven symphonies on CD in which the composer's metronome indi-
cations are not only (pretty much) followed, but also emblazoned
on the containers in an act of pious bravado. Having set the tempos,
however, the conductor adheres to them with dogged rigidity, con-
tradicting every eyewitness report we have of Beethoven's own con-
ducting, as well as the explicit instructions of eighteenth-century
conducting manuals.
Mr. Bilson and John Eliot Gardiner (the latter conducting the
English Baroque Soloists) complete the first recorded cycle of Mozart
piano concertos on "original instruments," representing the pieces in
their true colors at last. But the notes they play, for the most part, are
just the ones Mozart wrote. They do not add all the extra notes
Mozart's audiences actually heard.
These performers and others like them can be counted on to flout
historical evidence whenever it does not conform to their idea of "the
truth." They do it knowingly. In fact, because they are so much more
historically aware than conventionally trained musicians tend to
be, they flout historical evidence more knowingly than do their "mod-
ern" counterparts. With the growing success of Early Music, we are
increasingly surrounded by unhistorical sounds masquerading as
historicalor "authentic," to use a word that more sophisticated
performers now shun but that musical salesmen and spin doctors still
spout to seduce the unwary consumer.
Some of these unhistorical sounds are really central to the con-
cept of historical performance. Take the "countertenor" (male false-
tto) voice. It is the very emblem of Early Music. No Baroque opera
revival can get by without it. All the best historical vocal groups sport
it, whether they sing Renaissance madrigals (the Consort of Musicke),
the music of the pre-Reformation and Counter-Reformation Roman
Catholic Church (the Milliard Ensemble, the Tallis Scholars), or late
medieval polyphony (the Gothic Voices).
There is no evidence that falsettists participated in any of these
repertories when they were current. The voice was born in the English
cathedral choir, and owes its modern currency to the success of Alfred
Deller, an outstanding English cathedral alto, as pioneering protago-
nist of the modern Early Music revival in its antiquarian phase. It is
no accident, then, that all of the vocal groups listed above are English,
for they have founded their performing styles, as Deller did, on their
own distinguished national traditions. Their excellence has bred em-
ulation, establishing the English cathedral style as an international
sonic norm for Early Music, and the model on which Early Music
vocal production in all ranges is based.
166 IN THEORY

The best one can do to justify the current vogue for countertenors
on historical terms would be to say that, thanks to Deller's example,
we now like to hear our Palestrina sung as it might have been sung by
an Anglican choir in the sixteenth century. But in the sixteenth
century no Anglican choir would have dreamed of singing Palestrina's
music if they valued their lives.
There can be no historical justification at all for using an English
cathedral voice in a Handel opera. Handel, who knew perfectly well
what the falsettists of his adopted country sounded like, never wrote
for them until he had abandoned opera for English-texted oratories
that drew upon indigenous talent and traditions. When (like us) he
couldn't get a castrato for an opera performance, he happily dressed a
woman in trousers and plumed helmet. Handel's women, we can be
reasonably sure, sounded nothing like Alfred Deller. We can use
women, too, of course, and sometimes do, but unless the woman is
Marilyn Home, we seem to prefer countertenors, demonstrably un-
historical though they be.
So is Early Music just a hoax? Are the Bruggens and Bilsons
deceiving us, or themselves? Is "authentic" performance as inauthen-
ticas all that?
Not at all. It is authentic indeed, far more authentic than its
practitioners contend, perhaps more authentic than they know. Noth-
ing said above about Messrs. Briiggen, Norrington, and Bilson or the
rest should be taken in itself as criticism of the results they have
obtained. They have been rightly acclaimed. Their commercial suc-
cess is well deserved. Conventional performers are properly in awe
and in fear of them. 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 its 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 isobviously, no? a far worthier aim than historical verisimili-
tude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but perceived correctness? And
correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of
students, not artists.
So why the confusion? Why do we make a pretense of historical
performance when we're really creating something better? These
questions are so bound up with the nature of late-twentieth-century
taste that it would be better to postpone an answer till we've explored
that taste a bit.
Without attempting an exhaustive inventory, one can suggest a
few interrelated characteristics that exemplify current taste in the
The Modern Sound of Early Music 167

performance of classical music (and its composition, too, but that's a

story for another day):
It is text-centered, hence literalistic.
It is impersonal, hence unfriendly to spontaneity.
It is lightweight, hence leery of the profound or the sublime.
None of these traits began with Early Music, but Early Music has
brought them all to a peak. Literalism is as old as Toscanini, who
exhorted one and all to play what was set before them exactly as
written ("com'e scritto"), regardless of "tradition." Impersonalism is as
old as Stravinsky, who railed against "interpretation," and wanted his
performers to bejust as Mr. Briiggen proclaimed himselfobedient
"executants" of his will. Lightness is as old as Satie, inveterate de-
bunker of artistic pretension in the name of mental health.
Taken together, the three positions are conventionally labeled
antiromantic, though a closer look will reveal the ironic links binding
at least the first two with the Romantic enthronement of the auto-
cratic and infallible composer-creator, divorced from real-time music
making. (There you have the real roots of "modern"that is, Early
performance practice.)
What the three positionsenunciated by an Italian, a Russian,
and a Frenchman in turnalso (and unquestionably) share is an anti-
Teutonic bias. The style of performance they collectively describe has
been a contender since the 1920s, dominant since the 1930s, virtually
the only one since the 1950s andas revamped and re-outfitted with a
new instrumentariumthe one called "historical" (or "authentic")
since the 1960s. Early Music is no earlier than that.
The text-centricity of Early Music is self-evident, and so is its
literalism. That is what Early Musickers usually mean when they
speak of fidelity to the composer's intentions. Pushed to a new level, it
has brought us Mr. Bilson's Mozart, refreshingly rearticulated in
conformity with a newly cleansed text; and it has brought us Mr.
Norrington's Beethoven, radically reimagined so as to make those
metronome settings work. (And they do!)
Less obvious (indeed, expediently denied) is the corollary, hostil-
ity to unwritten performance tradition, which accounts for not only
Mr. Bilson's, but practically everyone's, reluctance to embellish the
bare notes of the scores they execute. So evennay, especiallyin the
most "obedient" Early Music performances of Mozart's piano con-
certos, the slow movements (and not only the slow movements) are
fairly denuded of the raiment Mozart expected them to flaunt. The
result is a kind of performance Mozart would have completely failed
to understandor to respect. So much for his intentions.
The impersonalism of Early Music has resulted in performances
of unprecedented formal clarity and precision. It has also resulted in a
168 IN THEORY

newly militant reluctance to make the subtle, constant adjustments

of tempo and dynamics on which expressivity depends, for these can
have no sanction but personal feeling. That is why Mr. Norrington's
tempos, though set in unprecedented conformity with Beethoven's
prescriptions, are completely un-Beethovenian past the first measure,
when Beethoven assumed that what he called the "tempo of feeling"
would take over. It is an assumption the twentieth century (and only
the twentieth century) has refused to make, and Beethoven would
have listened to Mr. Norrington's renditions with utter discomfort
and bewilderment.
The lightness of Early Music inheres in its very soundsthe
period instruments, the countertenor voices, the small forces. For the
high value placed on small forces there is no historical evidence, but
there is a distinguished twentieth-century ("Neoclassical") literature
for chamber orchestra, to which the Classical literature now con-
forms. The same ideal has recently been responsible for the resolute
trivialization of some notable monuments of Germanic profundity,
like the B minor Mass and the Choral Symphony.
We can't stand the sublime anymore, perhaps with good reason.
(We know something the nineteenth century didn't know: namely,
where Wagner led.) Do we need a fence around our good taste, not to
say our moral purity? Then no German is above suspicion, not even
Bach or Beethoven. If we are unwilling to give up their masterworks
altogether, Early Music can render them handily innocuous. That
may be a valid and necessary cultural critique, but it is not history.
Relics of the performance tradition to which all of this is a
reaction are still available to today's ears in recordings by Willem
Mengelberg, Artur Nikisch, Karl Muck, Wilhelm Furtwangler, and
many others (including composers like Hans Pfitzner and Richard
Strauss). They are instantly recognizable as premodern (and of course,
echt-Teutonic). To hear them is to realize how far we've traveled from
that phase of history. They show how fundamentally akin to standard
modern performance practices are those that claim to be historical.
The old recordings utterly debunk that pharisaical claim.; for record-
ings are the hardest evidence of performance practice imaginable.
If we truly wanted to perform historically, we would begin
by imitating early-twentieth-century recordings of late-nineteenth-
century music and extrapolate back from there. Instead, as already
implied, Early Music has been moving in the opposite direction. The
pioneers extrapolatedfrom very soft evidence bolstered by very firm
desiderataa style of performing Renaissance and Baroque music, and
from then on it has been a matter of speculative forward encroachment.
Even now, with the leading edge of the movement breaking into
the mid-nineteenth century, these old recordings are not being uti-
The Modern Sound of Early Music 169

lized except on the antiquarian fringe. Why? Because to our modern

taste they sound like caricatures. Nobody takes them seriously, least
of all the Early Musickers. (Listen sometime to the single-sided acous-
tical 78 of Mischa Elman's quartet playing Tchaikovsky, circa 1914,
and see if you can keep a straight face at their authentic scoops and
slides, transmitted to Elman directly from his teacher Leopold Auer,
for whom Tchaikovsky wrote his violin concerto.) We have our own
tastes, our own ways and our own agenda. In case of conflict, they
inevitably override the historical evidence. Which of course is how it
should bemust beif we have any sort of stake in our own culture.
To take the opposite tack would be a profession of apathy.
So forget history. What Early Music has been doing is busily
remaking the music of the past in the image of the present (necessary
because we unfortunately have so little use for the actual music of the
present), only calling the present by some other name.
Roger Norrington had just conducted a very jolly and spiffy
performance of Messiah when we met in San Francisco a couple of
Christmases ago. He was in an expansive mood. He began describing
his latest forays into Romantic terrain and his plans for the future,
which included Verdi.
"You'd be amazed how Classical Verdi really is," he said. "We're
going to do him completely without this, you know"here he screwed
up his mouth into a caricature of an opera singer's, and emitted a
tremulous woo-woo"and it will be a revelation."
Hmm, I thought, Mr. Norrington is going to get all the way to the
twentieth century without any woo-woo, and yet we know that some-
where along the line that old woo-woo certainly did exist. But more
power to the man. If woo-woo is of no interest to him, he has every
right to can it. And we have every right to love the result, as many of us
do. Mozart's disdain and Beethoven's discomfort need not deter us.
They are dead.
What is of interest, as I have suggested, is why we need the
pretensewhy Mr. Norrington needs to call his Verdi Classical in-
stead of modern. It is because in the absence of a vital creative
impulse classical music has become a chill museum. (The vitality,
alas, is with other forms of music, in which performers behave very
differently.) Our classical performers are the curators of their heri-
tage, not its proprietors. They are sworn to preserve it and trained to
be uncreative. So if you are creative, you have to hide the fact. You
have to come on (to yourself as well as others) as a better curator, not
a revamper.
Early Music has been the best curatorial credential of all, which
is why it has never been as creative a movement as "historically" it
ought to be. (Curators don't embellish or arrange, thank you, let alone
170 IN THEORY

improvise over a ground bass.) A violinist using a period bow can

claim to be a better curator than one who does not, and one using a
whole period violin is the best curator of all. A Roger Norrington
remaking Verdi will seem a better curator if he calls his creation
Classical rather than modern.

And here I must drop my dispassionate mask and deplore our afflicted
cultural ecology, in which (as Randolph Coleman of Oberlin College
has recently written) "the exorcising of homo ludens (man at play)
forms the initial stage of our musical pedagogy." Mr. Coleman con-
tinues, "Repetition, standardization, virtuosity, accuracy, perfection,
and professionalization (with its emphasis on patterns of conformity)
are the terms of our teachingnot experimentation, idiosyncrasy,
interaction, individuation, and especially not open-ended creative
play." Mr. Coleman is talking about elite classical music training, of
course, not the less lordly branches of our musical life, which have
retained far more creativity.
Early Music, were it more truly "historical," might have formed a
saving exception to this pattern; up to Mozart's time, at least, musical
values were generally closer to those of what we now call pop than to
those of our classical culture. But to ask that of Early Music may be
asking the impossible. It is a product of the classical value system,
after all, and its beneficiary. It cannot be expected to rebel. On the
contrary, it has measurably advanced the perfectionist standards of its
parent culture, pleasantly augmented its inventory of timbres and
become perhaps the least moribund aspect of our classical musical
life. That is accomplishment enough.

POSTSCRIPT 1994

The droll publication history of this piece, and the most constructive
correspondence it elicited, are reported in essay 7. Most of the corre-
spondence was captiously antagonistic, doubtless owing to the head-
line the Times editors insisted on running over it. (An exception was a
friendly correction from the critic Nicholas Deutsch, who wrote in to
remind me that Handel did use countertenors in his oratorios; the
text has been amended accordingly.) For a sample of the typical,
bemusingly irrelevant response the piece elicited from musicians, I'll
quote the portions of a really venomous letter from James Richman
that the Times saw fit to print. (Mr. Richman was no stranger to me,
incidentally. We performed together frequently in New York in olden
The Modem Sound of Early Music 171

days, and I was one of the founding members, along with him, of
Concert Royal, a group he still directs.) This is what the Times
printed, in the Arts and Leisure letters column for 26 August 1990:

Anyone who remembers Richard Taruskin's arch-Romantic interpreta-

tions of Ockeghem and Couperin knows why he is so anxious to
discredit the Early Music movement and the performance esthetic it
has engendered. Mr. Taruskin's personal taste runs to 19th-century
Russia (his specialty), and he would be quite happy if no one asked why a
musicologist would prefer to play older music as if it were Tchaikovsky.
Mr. Taraskin is at the heart of what is wrong with Early Music
today. Instead of objective scholars, we have professors performing part-
time; instead of impartial arbiters and keepers of the flame, we have
involved personalities with axes to grind.
Contrary to what Mr. Taruskin would have readers believe, there is
a great deal of respect for the discoveries of modern research in the Early
Music field. The vast majority of original-instrument performers take
as much care as they can (short of bringing back the castrato voice) to
follow the ways of the old masters. Honest mistakes are inevitable, but
that is a different issue from the case of a musicologist deliberately
picking and choosing from available data to justify his personal taste.
A great deal of good work has been done, often by the very people
Mr. Taruskin maligns, and it is a pity that his attitude casts such a
negative pall over it. Great quantities of Western music are available
today in informed performances as never before, thanks to dedicated
performers who have broken the stranglehold of the 19th-century esthe-
tic. As Early Music has for 25 years been a field driven primarily by the
idealism of its proponents, that is an impressive achievement.

Not exactly the words of an "impartial arbiter," thank heaven.

That is precisely the point: the last thing a performer ought to be is
impartial. And, by and large, they are not. They care. Musicians like
James Richman are committed artists, enthusiastically pursuing an
ideal of beauty in which they fervently believe. As he says, they are
idealists, and their idealism has no greater admirer than I. What I am
waiting for is an end to the pretense that what Early Music performers
are doing is (merely) historically correct. They are not ransacking
history in pursuit of the truth. What they are looking for is permission.
Being human, when they find permission they are apt to believe
that they have found the truth, and become "certain," to use Leo
Treitler's word. Such certainty inevitably breeds intolerance. In the
unedited version of his letter, Mr. Richman properly lauded the demo-
cratic leveling influence of positivistic research. Under positivism,
"mere performers can be experts too":

Most musicians accept new data when it comes their way, and a lot of
them now know a great deal about the source materials which used to
172 IN T H E O R Y

be the exclusive territory of the "experts." This is a most wonderful

development, completely in the spirit of the Enlightenment; each per-
son is capable and free, by dint of careful examination of the evidence,
to form his or her own reasoned conclusions.

Heaven help him or her, though, if those conclusions differ from

Mr. Richman's.
Why has it been difficult or impossible for so many musicians to
let go of the false perception that historical verisimilitude is in itself a
measure of artistic worth? Why should another letter writer, David
Pritchard, have assumed that I thought it was "ridiculous" to use
countertenors in Handelian castrate roles, when all I said was that it
is "demonstrably unhistorical"? But of course I gave the reason, as I see
it, in the very article to which my correspondents responded; perhaps
they never got to the end.