Performing Issues

The title of this post might suggest controversy, but it is not intended to be controversial. The excerpt that follows was taken from my current reading: Early Music: A Very Short Introduction. This is one more book of Oxford University Press collection A Very Short Introduction, a sort of fast-reading book that puts you on the terminology and theory behind the idea of whats early music all about. The excerpt was taken from the fifth chapter whos title gives the title to this post. An important aspect of early music, a way of defining it dynamically, is the effort to take a piece of music on its own terms, to perform music in its own way. If we grant that each piece of music comes into existence in a specific time and place, reflecting its own culture, then it follows that its audience was used to the musicians and the performing styles of that period. If we want to reflect that cultural background, if we want to have the soundexperience that listeners had when that piece was new, we should perform the piece in a manner consistent with other pieces in the same or similar style. With the passage of time, performing styles change, musical desiderata change, instruments change. With the passage of a great deal of time, those things change a great deal; when an old piece is rediscovered, revived, and played by those much later musicians, and heard by those much later listeners, the result may be very satisfactory indeed, or it may not but it will probably be different in many respects from how the hypothetical piece sounded when it was new. Nobody at least of all early-music aficionados says that modern performances on modern instruments with modern performing techniques, modern venues, and modern listeners, cannot be entirely satisfactory. What the early-music people do say, however, is that it would be awfully interesting to hear how Bach sounded to Bach, or Machaut to Machaut. Possibly some of the things that we do not fully understand, that do not quite seem convincing, will seen clearer when we have studied the

performing techniques of the period; if we let music speak for itself, in its own language, perhaps we will understand it better. A Great deal of research in a field broadly know as performance practice continues to add to our knowledge about the practices of past times. Instruments, playing and singing style, ornamentation, pitch, and tuning have been studied, discussed, and experimented with in recent decades. As we learn more, and as time and taste progress, styles change even within the early-music field. This is surely appropriate.
In: Kelly, Thomas. Early Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 69-70.