The Labyrinth: using new music experience in the performance of historical music

George Kentros

The education of a classical violinist – or mine at least, and I see scant evidence that anything else holds today – begins based on a mainstream Romantic ideal consisting of works, geniuses, and concepts of musical authenticity. This is quite useful as a tool to cajole the young violinist into learning the essentials of tone production and playing styles but is at odds with a questioning attitude towards normative traditions that might allow the musician greater interpretive freedom after gaining that technique. While the historically informed performance (HIP) movement was an early, important manifestation of this sort of questioning attitude, the experimental/avantgarde tradition, which has run parallel to these others from the early twentieth century, has not often been applied to the interpretation of historical music. The experimental tradition does not assume conventional tone production or historical authenticity: instead, it is asking the musician to interpret the symbols on the page according to their own artistically informed predilections and contexts to produce new performances emanating from the artwork, thereby transferring more responsibility for the performance from the composer to the musician. To what extent might the experience of the performer be allowed to contribute to the performance of a historical work? As part of a three-year artistic research project in Stockholm, I have been looking into ways of using interpretive techniques gleaned from the study of new music and applying these to historical works. This article describes some existing research that questions the traditional interpretive paradigm, along with the ontology of a musical work and its interpretation, and concludes with a case study, “The Labyrinth,” showing one way that these sorts of attitudes can be put into practice for a genre of music to which they seldom, if ever, have been applied.

List of references

Alard, Jean Delphin (1868). Le Labyrinthe de L´Harmonie Par Pietro Locatelli. Mainz-Leipzig: B. Schott’s Söhne.

Attali, Jacques (1985). Noise. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Berg, J. (1922). Pietro Locatelli da Bergamo. Tijdschrift der Vereeniging voor Noord-Nederlands Muziekgeschiedenis, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 185–194.

Cage, John (1968). Silence: lectures and Writings. Richmond: Calder and Boyars.

David, Ferdinand, and Henri Petri (1903). Die Hohe Schule Des Violinspiels. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, p. 50.

de Assis, Paolo (2018). The Logic of Experimentation. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1987). The Truth in Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dreyfus, Lawrence (1983). Early Music Defended Against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 3, pp. 297–322.

Dunning, Albert, and Arend Koole (1964). Pietro Antonio Locatelli. Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, Vol. 20, No. 1/2, pp 52–96.

D’Errico, Lucia (2018). Aberrant Likenesses: The Transposition of Resemblances in the Performance of Written Music. In Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 59–74.

Ex, Nicole (1993). Zo Goed Als Oud: De Achterkant Van Het Restaureren. Amsterdam: Amber.

Ferneyhough, Brian 1995. Collected Writings. Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Goehr, Lydia (2007). The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heartz, Daniel (1998). Locatelli and the Pantomime of the Violinist in “Le Neveu De Rameau”. Diderot Studies, Vol. 27, pp. 115–127.

Kivy, Peter (1995). Authenticities. Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kostelanetz, Richard, and John Cage (1987). The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview. The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 102–130.

Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel (2020). Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them. Version 2.2. At https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/.

Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel (1984). What We Are Doing with Early Music Is Genuinely Authentic to Such a Small Degree that the Word Loses Most of Its Intended Meaning. Early Music, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 13–16.

Locatelli, Pietro (1733). L’Art Del Violino, XII Concerti. Honfleur: Michel-Charles Le Cene.

Nadaud, Edouard (1900) Locatelli, L’Art Du Violon. Paris: Éditions Costallat.

Riley, Terry (1964). In C. New York: Associated Music Publishers.

Sinker, Mark (1997). Shhhhhh! The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 210–241.

Small, Christopher (1998). Musicking. The Meaning of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Taruskin, Richard (1982). On Letting the Music Speak for Itself. Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance. The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 338–349.

Taruskin, Richard (1996). Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Oxford: University Press.

van Saaze, Vivian (2013). Installation Art and the Museum. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Tip

Tip

George Kentros - The Labyrinth: using new music experience in the performance of historical music - 2024