Authenticity
This month’s column is about authenticity in the study and performance of music. Or, more accurately, it suggests ways that teachers can help students grapple with questions of authenticity. As with the teaching of other technical or specific aspects of playing, I think that teaching about authenticity should be done in a way that respects students’ individuality and autonomy, that increases rather than limits choice, and that helps students to feel ever more comfortable making choices of their own. This might seem to be a paradox, since the concept of “authenticity” might seem to carry with it an air of “authority,” of “right or wrong,” of “we know how it was done and (therefore) how it should be done.” In fact, however, ideas, information, concepts, and modes of analysis that one way or another reside in the realm of authenticity—historical authenticity or concern for the composers’ intentions—are neither more nor less authoritarian in nature than any other ideas that might arise in the work of a musician. They can be thought about, accepted, rejected, used in different ways by different performers, and used in different ways by the same performer at different times or under different circumstances.
What follows is not an outline for a curriculum about historical authenticity. Rather, it is a somewhat personal miscellany of questions, ideas, and interesting quotes. I have always liked and admired the approach of Peter Williams as described in the Preface to the Second Edition of his extraordinary book The Organ Music of J. S. Bach: “[this book’s] style and method still work towards framing questions rather than defining answers.” Answers are important, but questions are even more so. Answers quite properly change, as new information comes in or as circumstances change. Questions normally shouldn’t go away, though new ones should always be expected to arise.
Why does authenticity matter?
The first question, logically, is this: why do we or should we care about authenticity? Ways of thinking about this question seem to me to hold the key to freeing the concept of authenticity from the burden of authoritarianism. In fact, as far as I am concerned there is no reason that we should care about authenticity—emphasis on the word “should”. There are many ways in which caring about authenticity can be rewarding. There are also ways in which we automatically and inevitably care about authenticity whenever we study or play music that we are not ourselves improvising at that moment. In fact, questions about whether or not—and how—to care about authenticity are really questions about how far to take our concern for authenticity and how to shape it. However, if anyone who plays music wishes to say, in effect “thank you, composer, for having provided me with a set of notes; I will now do the rest,” I believe that this is perfectly OK: not immoral, dishonest, or inartistic, though also not my own choice. Between this attitude and what might be considered its polar opposite—“I will never play anything unless I can be convinced that my performance is literally indistinguishable from that of the composer”—there lie all of the real-life possibilities for approaches to authenticity.
Not surprisingly, I have never actually known anyone to articulate either of these extreme positions as their own, though Wanda Landowska came close to the former position late in her life. (This was not exactly out of lack of respect for composers or their intentions, but out of the interesting but perhaps questionable idea that she had by then come to know the music so well that she was as much of an authority on it as the composers could have been.) The latter attitude—hyper-authenticity—I have only heard as a parody of historical-mindedness by people who were themselves essentially against it. It seems to me that any underlying philosophical attitude towards historical authenticity can be artistically rewarding if it is honestly and joyously held by the musician—student or experienced player. The attempt, on the part of a teacher or of any “expert” or (worst of all) of the student’s own superego, to impose a particular attitude about authenticity creates the danger that authenticity will be felt as a burden or a constraint.
What is authenticity?
What is this “authenticity” then, about which we each have a somewhat different attitude? After all, the nature of what is being sought must have some influence on our attitudes about seeking it. One way to look at historical authenticity is, as I alluded to above, as a simple amplification of the basic question: “what is this piece?” If we tell our audience that we are playing such-and-such a piece, then we expect ourselves—and they have the right to expect us—to play that piece. If I (just to put it absurdly) announce that I am going to play the Bach F-major Toccata and then sit down at the organ and play the note middle C hundreds of times in a row, I have not done what I said I was going to do. If I make the same claim and then play most of the notes of the actual BWV 540, but omit the pedal solos, then I have probably also not done what I said I was going to do. If I attempt to play the piece but make a truly astonishing number of wrong notes, then I have perhaps also not done so. If I play all of the notes, accurately and completely, but really slowly—sixteenth-note equals 32, say—then have I performed the piece? Suppose I play a slow piece mind-bendingly fast, so that cantabile lines become lightening-fast passage work and the listener can’t recognize pitches. How off-tempo must a piece be to cease being that piece?
Now, less absurdly, suppose that I make legato that which the composer clearly intended to be detached, or the other way around? Suppose that I make lines so detached that the overlapping of the notes of suspensions is lost? Suppose that I make very strict and metronomic a piece or passage that the composer has clearly marked as free or molto rubato? Suppose that the piece isn’t marked that way, but that we know that the composer expected it to be played that way? Suppose that I change the sonority, perhaps playing the Widor Toccata on an 8-foot Gedeckt throughout? Suppose that the changes in sonority, rhythm, or articulation are quite subtle? At what point does a piece become not that piece?
There are no definitive answers to questions like this. And the point of asking them is not to suggest that they can or must be answered before we can just relax and play music. The point is to suggest that the information that we might seek in the name of authenticity is not the stuff of some arcane intellectual pursuit, but rather a common-sense extension of what we do anyway when we open up a score and start to learn it. For some pieces, we do not even know for sure what the basic note picture is, in every detail. This can be true because of misprints or other problems in transmission, or because a composer left alternate versions. With aspects of “what the piece really is” that go beyond the notes themselves, of course the proportion of i) what we can know for sure, ii) what we know fairly well, and iii) what we honestly don’t know shifts toward the latter two. This can be a source of frustration or a source of freedom—probably both for most of us.
Finding authenticity
However, for me, knowing as much as I can about anything that might legitimately be part of “what the piece really is” is liberating. If I know all that can be known about a piece or a segment of the repertoire—no more and no less—then I can make my own decisions about how I want to play that piece or that repertoire. To the extent that I don’t know all that there is to be known, I am letting my performance of that piece be shaped by forces that are not my own, the nature of which I might not even understand. These forces include arbitrary or incorrect traditions that have grown up around a piece or a part of the repertoire, judgments by an editor that might be correct or incorrect but that shouldn’t pre-empt my own judgments, and unconscious habits of my own that I might want to change or to apply differently if I thought them through.
(If I pick up a novel that I want to read, I expect to be able to read the text of that novel as is. If, in the copy I have, a previous reader has written notes—“this character is odd,” “the best part is coming up!,” “I’m not sure I believe this,” etc.—then, in effect, I cannot do my own reading of the book. I can’t help filtering my reading through those comments. This is so unsatisfying that I will either look for another copy or not read the book at all. Even if I would have ended up agreeing with the comments—in fact even if I wrote them myself years before—they destroy my autonomy in reading the book. For me anything other than knowing what there is to know about a piece of music—again, no more and no less—creates a similar situation.)
As one interesting example, consider wanting to learn and play some Reger on an organ in a church in the U.S.—any organ, but let us assume it is not an accurate re-creation of an organ that Reger would have known. How would one’s approach differ in each of the following circumstances:
1) never heard of swell pedal, crescendo pedal or Rollschweller
2) heard of swell pedal and crescendo pedal but not Rollschweller
3) heard of swell pedal only
4) heard of all three, and have a good sense of what each one does
5) believe that Reger wrote in the eighteenth century, and that dynamic markings must have been added by an editor
6) have never seen dynamic markings before and don’t know what they mean.
Perhaps the last two seem silly, but each of us starts with that lack of knowledge with respect to at least some repertoire; I have certainly done so over the years. In any case, the task would be the same under each condition, that of adapting Reger’s intentions and the rhetoric of the music to an instrument different from the ones for which it was conceived. But the approach and the results would probably be quite different.
So the search for accurate historical information is, at one level, just a tool for creating the conditions for thinking honestly and with autonomy about how to interpret and play a piece. As such, this search implies literally nothing about how the information should be used. It is perfectly possible to say “yes, this piece probably was meant (by its composer) to go this way, but I want it to go that way,” as long as one is honest about this thought process. (I mean honest with one’s self. It is not particularly anyone else’s business unless you want it to be.) The next level of the search for authenticity is this: that, for some people, the very phenomenon of being in sync with the artistic intentions of another person—say of a great composer—is desirable and satisfying in itself. Most of us have had this feeling to some extent, and some of us have to a very great extent indeed. For some, it is a large part of the joy of being involved with music—for others, it is more or less a spice or a bonus: satisfying, but of fairly little importance.
The presence or absence of this feeling will certainly inform anyone’s decisions about how to use any valid historical information. It is through this connection, perhaps, that certain kinds of second-level or “meta” historical information become important. For example, we may know that Bach played his pieces on a certain kind of organ or harpsichord, but what do we know of his attitude towards the playing of his music on other instruments? We know that he did a fair amount of transcribing: violin pieces for harpsichord, and so on. Or do we? Many or perhaps all of those transcriptions may have been done by others in his circle, though perhaps with his knowledge. He certainly traveled and played organs other than the ones in his immediate home area. On one trip he played on a “piano”, though one that sounded more like a harpsichord than like a modern piano. What did he think of this experience? We don’t know.
What was Bach’s own attitude towards the question of how essential different aspects of music creation were? That is, did he believe that the note-picture of a piece and the theoretical structure that it creates are the entire essence of a piece, or did he believe that the sonority, for example, is equally essential. Here’s a paradox: if Bach believed the former, but I as a modern performer believe the latter, then am I coming closer to being “in sync” with Bach if I pursue all the knowledge that I can find about instruments, playing techniques, etc., or if I don’t? (This is hypothetical, since we really don’t know Bach’s attitude on this point.) Certainly most composers over the centuries have not been predominantly interested in discovering and (authentically) performing old music. Does this mean that if we use historical research to try to answer the question of “what the piece really is,” but the composer of that piece would never have used or advocated those techniques, we are being unfaithful to the composer while being faithful to the piece? Is this another paradox?
Historical re-creation
At this point I want to say something about historical re-creation. One criticism of the whole enterprise of seeking authenticity in playing music is that “we don’t live in their times, therefore we just can’t make their music.” This implies that the search for an accurate historical understanding of the pieces that make up our repertoire is somehow intended as an attempt to turn back the clock and re-create the times in which the pieces were written, or that it ought to be intended that way, but that at the same time this is impossible and absurd. So, if we want to try to find fingerings and hand positions that facilitate the execution of notes inégales in the music of Couperin, we must also eat what Couperin ate, and forswear cars, etc. (I understand that this is a rare criticism, but it is sort of “in the air” and I have indeed known students to shy away from seeking historical information for fear of being subject to it in their own minds or others.) Certainly some people find it fascinating to try, in a circumscribed way, to re-create things about living in the past or to re-enact aspects of life in distant times. There is certainly nothing wrong with that. However, that is not the point of gathering accurate historical information about musical repertoire and performance. The point is, once again, to know what the piece is, and then to use that knowledge and that piece in your own life and times in whatever ways are fruitful and useful. It is in every way analogous to cleaning an old painting that has become grimy. It is not necessary to live like Rembrandt in order to prefer to see his paintings without a layer of grease and dirt.
Many years ago, my teacher and friend Paul Jordan said something to me along the following lines: that the act of doing something in performance because you yourself honestly believe in it artistically is categorically different from the act of doing something because you have been told that it is “right”. This has always seemed to me to be true, certainly at an artistic level, but also at a practical level: performing is hard, and performing while trying to remember a way of doing things that you have only learned externally is astonishingly hard. I myself have become convinced of the artistic value of honestly seeking accurate historical information through a circumstance that more or less bypasses analysis: my own true experience has been that when I discover something about the playing of a piece that seems to be a more authentic expression of what the composer intended, I believe that it made the piece better: more expressive, more intense, more moving. This is not, on reflection, surprising. Composers by and large know what they are doing, and most of them, being practical musicians, develop consummate skill at working with the materials at hand.
If however I try something—fingering, registration, an approach to rhythm, phrasing, or articulation—that I believe to be an accurate reflection of what the composer intended, and, in good faith, I don’t or can’t like it, then my own choice (mindful of what Paul said, and of my own experience) is to refrain from implementing it for now, but rather to play the piece or passage in the way that I find convincing. As I said, I have not actually had this conflict very often. And when I do have it, I still feel respectful of whatever it is that I have decided not to do, and I am always open to revisiting it later. I am quite comfortable with this approach—more so than either with shying away from seeking historical knowledge for fear that having it would force me to be overly academic, or with making myself play in ways that are not deeply, personally convincing for fear of being considered “wrong”.
