Cultivating Anachronism: radical concert production techniques for historically-informed performers

CARLO DIAZ (carlodiaz.com)

Few working in historically-informed performance (HIP) today will deny that anachronisms—in the sense defined by the historian Michael Bentley as “evidence that is temporally inappropriate to its subject”—still exist in their performances.[1] In the 1980s Richard Taruskin, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, John Butt and others argued that many of these anachronisms are entirely unavoidable; that HIP can never be purely ‘authentic’, in the sense referring to, in Peter Kivy’s words, exact correlation to “the physical object as it issued from [the historical musician’s] “studio”.”[2] Many have largely accepted this diagnosis and followed their advice to drop the word ‘authenticity’ but continue in pursuit of it as before. John Butt’s argument is that the value of HIP “has little to do with actual historical accuracy” but lies in the fact that it “will force the player to rethink his techniques and interpretative capability, and thus the repertory will have to be seen in a new light.”[3] In other words, the process of negotiating between historical information and one’s aesthetics predispositions leads to a performative result that is more novel and more authentic to oneself.

What they propose is, in my own words, to abandon the assertion that a historical reconstruction can be purely authentic and shift instead toward increasing the relative authenticity of a performance practice by gradually clearing away anachronisms. And this approach works moderately well. Many people working in the field are doing very exciting work that challenges musicians to savor the at-first-bizarre-but-then-extraordinary music that can be made when they sincerely attempt to let go of their instincts and adopt a new frame of mind that is believed to be more aligned to a particular musical past. But this still leaves the concept of authenticity, which has been shown to be problematic at its very core, as the driving force behind Early Music. The shift from pure authenticity to relative authenticity (or even to authenticity by its other dictionary definition, which refers to truth according to one’s own “spirit”[4]) is merely a bandage over a wound that still festers. It leaves an insincerity in the practice of HIP because its method (which remains the pursuit of historical authenticity) has no correlation to the only admissible value of its end-product (novelty).

That HIPerformers have not found a publicly[5] viable way to assign value to their music other than by assessment against a criterion that is not even what they’re actually looking for in the end is, in my opinion, the biggest problem faced by HIP today. But this problem can be solved. In this paper I aim to demonstrate that when the authenticity problem is brought to bear on aspects of musical performance having to do with concert production (as opposed to interpretation), and when radical attempts are made to increase relative authenticity within this domain, an important question appears regarding the overall purpose of HIP. We arrive in a problem area where, paradoxically, more severe anachronism produces higher relative authenticity. And this forces a new understanding of HIP that transcends the concept of historical authenticity (and its uninspiring work-arounds of novelty and personal authenticity); that renders it not incorrect, problematic, or overly idealistic, but simply irrelevant. What emerges in its place is a entirely new paradigm for HIP that abandons the attempt to reconstruct past musical cultures ‘as they actually were’[6] in favor of a new interest in ‘historical argumentation in and through musical performance’.

To set our playing field: by the term ‘concert production’ I mean curation (the selecting, editing, arranging, and placing-in-order of notation), choice of venue, lighting, amplification (or lack thereof), timing, catering, print material, and spoken word. And to prevent misunderstanding, by ‘concert’ I mean any event in which live musical performance plays a significant role. Essentially my domain is every aspect of music except the interpretation of notation, not because interpretation has no bearing on the concert environment but simply because my fields of technical expertise are composition (including editing, arranging, and curating historical music) and concert production. And somewhat arbitrarily, but for the sake of coherence, I will confine the arguments presented in this text to the topic of music in eighteenth-century London, both because it is my primary area of historical expertise and because significant research has been conducted recently into venues for live music. [7]

To dive in: the current anachronisms faced by HIPerformers of eighteenth-century music in regard to concert production are primarily the result of what William Weber[8] and Lydia Goehr[9] describe as a broad cultural shift that took place around the turn of the nineteenth century. As they describe it, music transformed during this period from one component of a cultural ecosystem also involving dancing, eating, drinking, and conversation toward an independent system wherein musical works are to be experienced in isolation. What Weber and Goehr identify is a shift from a generalized to a specialized culture, which can be used to explain the current norm in classical concert production: clear separation between audience and performer; absolute quiet while music is played; no food or drink consumed during the performance; printed program showing which pieces are played, in which order, who composed them, their “full” (archive/catalogue-style) titles; no applause between movements; no talking by performers; bright stage lighting; and dark audience lighting. This is why Goehr compares the culture to a museum. Museums traditionally present artifacts in no relationship to the culture that produced them. They may contextualize them verbally in adjacent placards, but the physical environment is typically sparsely and homogeneously decorated, whitewashed, brightly lit, and windowless. And to be sure, lots of interesting things are happening in the field of museology today that do not fit this description,[10] but such developments do not seem to have reached the music world just yet.

In cultures that existed before this presentational concept arose, there is no denying that the experience of viewing a historical artifact in a museum is different from the experience of viewing it had by any member of the cultural space that created it. Consider a satirical print by William Hogarth. Vic Gatrell argues that the public-facing life-cycle of these pieces generally began in a print shop, where each would be hung in a window alongside many other similar prints to be viewed by the shop’s visitors. From there, they would be purchased and brought to a tavern, club or home, where they would be viewed and shared by their buyer and his or her social circle. Finally, they would likely be placed in a book or box as part of a collection of similar pieces in the buyer’s home.[11] Though it’s possible other types of places could be involved, none of the primary locations implied here—the shop, the club, amd the home—resembles a modern museum at all. They are spaces whose primary purpose are other than the viewing of art—shopping, drinking, socializing, living, etc. So to place one of these pieces in a museum, on a white wall, under bright lighting is to create an artistic experience other than that which existed in its culture of origin; in other words, to create an anachronistic experience of that historical object. If you believe that there is more involved in shaping the perception of an art object or experience than the specific physical form of that object or experience itself, this is a problem. If not, don’t bother reading the rest of this essay.

Additionally, it feels worth reiterating here that this type of anachronism is only problematic if one is interested in replicating a historical viewing experience. Many are not, to be sure, but my argument is that by following this line of argumentation we will discover a way out of the problem of authenticity altogether instead of using the same slimy, gross bandage that most HIPerformers ‘uninterested’ in authenticity have been using for the past forty years.

To carry on, consider a recent concert by the London-based Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE). Here is a screenshot of the venue’s web page for the event:[12]

The venue was Queen Elizabeth Hall at London’s Southbank Centre, which is a traditional classical concert hall. It has a raised stage toward which several hundred theatre seats face, there is a gentle incline to the floor of the seating area, and the stage is well-lit and large enough to accommodate at least 70 musicians. Upon entering the venue I was offered a 20-or-so-page booklet with a listing of the performers and repertoire (identical to the information on the website), information on the venue, the musicians, the instruments, the music, and the OAE’s funders. When it was time for the performance to begin, the lighting of the seating area was dimmed, the lighting of the stage was intensified, the performers walked on stage, the audience applauded, the performers bowed and sat down, everyone became quiet, the conductor/organist/harpsichordist introduced himself and talked about the music, and then the music began. While each piece was played, the audience remained quiet apart from occasional cough or rustle of paper. Between discrete movements of each piece the audience and performers remained silent and there was a gap of roughly one to ten seconds. At the end of each piece, there was applause. At the end of the final piece on the program, there was considerably longer and louder applause than at any previous point of the concert, and then everyone slowly left the hall.

The parallels between this way of presenting music and the way of presenting satirical prints in museums should be fairly obvious. For each piece, the program lists the composer, type (e.g. overture, sinfonia, concerto), key, instrumentation, and catalogue number. In art galleries, wall labels usually state the “artist’s name, date of birth/death if applicable, title and date of the work, perhaps series title, medium, collection reference number or courtesy line, and possibly some link and/or QR code.”[13] The bright neutral lighting of the stage mirrors the bright neutral lighting of traditional museums. The comfortable spacing of artworks on a wall mirrors the silence between movements and the applause between pieces in a concert, though in music the situation is even more extreme because, whereas in a museum the visitor can move through the museum at her or his leisure, in a concert the audience is confined to a single position in the room and has no choice but to experience the music on offer at the pace and order decided upon by the powers that be. And so on.

This differs markedly from any type of musical activity through most of the eighteenth century, especially in London. In his introduction to the edited volume Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Simon McVeigh describes a transition in musical performance venues from taverns in the first half of the century to purpose-built concert halls in the second. And though he does argue that, by the latter half of the century, “the concert had crystallized into an event of its own, independent of the usual activities to which music formed an accompaniment, such as eating or drinking, dancing or conversing, praying or marching”[14], he still describes many of those more crystallized events as drastically different than current classical concerts. For example, he claims that " it was fashionable not to arrive until well into the first half, while many wandered off before the end of the three-hour concert"; that “orchestral, solo and chamber items were carefully blended into a varied program” intended first and foremost to highlight vocal music; that “no eighteenth-century organizer would have contemplated programming half a dozen Handel concertos in a row”; that “London audiences regarded the concert hall as an extension of their own drawing room [and therefore] behaved much as they did at private soirées”; and that there was a “constant expectation of novelty and thus new repertoire.”[15] In an earlier book, McVeigh claims that “it was perfectly normal for audiences to walk around during concerts”; that, quoting Frances Burney, “‘the best Operas and Concerts are accompanied with a buzz and murmur of conversation’”[16]; and that “solo repertoire apart, prodigy composers are hardly ever advertised…”[17] Peter Borsay draws together similar observations in his assertion that “eighteenth century concert locations—theatres, assembly rooms, walks and pleasure gardens—were among the key sites for the acquisition and exchange of status, and … music lay at the heart of the process by which social identities were created and the social order reproduced.”[18] Borsay argues that the reason purpose-built concert venues arrived in significant number only around a century later than purpose-built theatre venues was that music was seen as inseparable from a broader cultural system. But far from being a “parasitic” status, he claims that

the close and mutually beneficial association between concerts and other forms of cultural activity […] and the deployment of common spaces, might also be read as a sign of strength; of music’s uniquely ubiquitous and pervasive presence, and its centrality to the eighteenth-century project. There is, indeed, a case for arguing that music was the substance that lubricated the whole machinery of fashionable culture, whose scale and complexity expanded so rapidly during the century.[19]

Simply put, the museum-inspired model of concert production was not yet in place. Concerts in mid-eighteenth-century London seem to have been generally more like what we would now call parties than recitals.

It should be clear that the current model for classical concerts is anachronistic for eighteenth-century music, but the question is how to increase the relative authenticity of HIP in this regard? It will be fairly easy to adopt a curatorial approach that weaves together vocal, orchestral, chamber, and solo instrumental music in the miscellaneous style[20] common to the period and to highlight performers over composers in marketing materials. But some pretty vexing problems remain. In regard to curation, a high value seems to have been placed on novelty. It was the general aura of freshness presented by new (or new-in-town) compositions that made concerts exciting. But how can we create an impression of newness when we’re drawing from a limited repository of notation that has existed for hundreds of years? In regard to the concert environment, one of the most significant characteristics of the eighteenth-century listening experience seems to be the fact of intermittent attention. But how can we create such a multi-disciplinary, intermittent, casual, and social experience for present-day audiences that are so strictly trained in focused, museum-esque concert etiquette?

Let’s begin with the concert environment and the quality of intermittent attention. Firstly, why is it significant? As argued above, the museum-style concert format is specifically designed to focus audience attention on the music. Everything non-musical is either eliminated or made as inconspicuous as possible. As the nineteenth century began, musical works grew longer and highly-detailed developmental and narrative forms became popular. These forms work well when an listener is focused intently from start to finish of each piece because the artfulness of composition comes in the way a piece is elaborated over a long period of time. Conversely, individual pieces of music tended to be relatively short in the eighteenth century, focused on elegant melody and artful ornamentation (simplistically put), both of which are far more instantaneous phenomena than long-term formal elaboration. So eighteenth-century music lends itself more easily to being appreciated on a moment-to-moment basis. One can focus in for a particularly sumptuous passage and then zone out, and then come back in when something else lovely happens. There is no need to obsess over every second of music because the joy of it comes from small pleasures completely divorced from any concept of a coherent whole work. And to be sure: to say that the listening experience was characterized by intermittent attention is not to say that no one listened to or cared about music but rather that musical listening was merely one aspect of a more transdisciplinary cultural experience.[21] So a museum-style concert of mid-eighteenth-century music is odd in the same way as a seated concert by a Footwork DJ is a bit odd because the music wasn’t designed to be consumed in that manner. The music is being asked to do something it was never intended to do.

But how can we effect this intermittent audience attention in a present-day concert? It’s conceivable that the physical environment of a specific eighteenth-century performance could be recreated as closely as possible given the extant information: sofas, tables and chairs could be spread around a room and refreshments could be offered. Additionally, each attendee could be given information on historical audience behavior: ‘you may arrive thirty to forty minutes late, you may talk while the musicians are playing, you may get up to grab a drink at any time,’ and so on. But this is highly didactic. It assumes that each attendee will actually read the information beforehand and not succumb to their usual urge to ‘shush’ people who make noise during concerts. It assumes that they will not question the value of intermittent listening over focused attention. And it forces them to act in a way that they are not comfortable acting; to mime a behavior with which they are not familiar (leaving aside the fact that the behavior they are familiar with in classical concerts is just as, if not more, unnatural, bizarre, and forced). This is why I think it’s important to again note that HIP is necessarily an approximation of the musical past, and even an approximation of history. If its aim really was simply to reconstruct a historical musical culture, we would do much better to collaborate with actors trained in historical etiquette and ‘perform’ for them in a private, controlled environment completely cut off from the public. The fact that no one is doing this reveals that actual intentions are different: not to recreate a historical musical culture but to convey some necessarily limited, approximated, adapted, translated version of a musical past to a non-specialist public. And this requires exactly the kind of bastardization of that culture that museums create. It also requires anachronism.

But there is no reason that this anachronism must be one that is so far removed philosophically and aesthetically from the musical culture we’re interested in. If anachronism is inevitable, if the settings of our performances and the manner in which we curate them will inevitably draw on something ‘temporally inappropriate’, why not at least choose something that is close in spirit to the original? Why not choose among different types of anachronism instead of letting tradition choose for us? There are events which take place at present where music is the main attraction, where food and drinks are consumed, where people chat while musicians are performing, and where arriving late is the norm: jazz clubs and bars that have live music, for example. Would presenting eighteenth-century music in these venues be any more anachronistic than presenting them in classical concert halls? Surely not.

And there would be many advantages. The amplification would allow for people to talk without disturbing anyone’s ability to hear the music and, if done very well (‘naturally’), would enable everyone to hear the nuance of tone and ornamentation that makes mid-eighteenth-century music so special. The ready availability of food and drink and the presence of tables and comfortable, varied seating arrangements would promote sociability and ward off the fatigue of hunger and the boredom of sobriety. And if a performer, concert/festival producer, or ensemble wanted a more explicitly eighteenth-century environment, they could always produce an event in a rented event space that was furnished and catered according to their exact specifications. Because not a single jazz club existed in the eighteenth century, it is anachronistic to perform eighteenth-century music in a jazz club today. But crucially, it is less anachronistic to perform in a jazz club than a classical concert hall.

Moving on to curation—by which I mean the way musical notation is searched for, selected, edited, and placed into an order—my interest is directed at the experience of concert culture as a whole in pre-work musical cultures, wherein a defining characteristic was the constant re-circulation of musical materials. James Webster opposes this to the organicism of the late eighteenth century; what he describes as the “musical logic” of Haydn and Beethoven.[22] Webster cites Charles Rosen in a description of Haydn’s work, which claims that “the development and the dramatic course of a work all can be found latent in the material,” and “that the material can be made to release its charged force so that the music […] is literally impelled from within.”[23] In this type of form each new work states its independence on outside influence through continuous variation of a single original topic. In contrast, galant music (organicism’s predecessor), enters into dialogue with its cultural context through repeated juxtaposition of familiar topics. Robert Gjerdingen, who describes galant style as “a particular repertory of stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences,”[24] argues that a galant composer’s “frame of reference was the musical experience of their entire lives, not solely the sonatas of Opus 2”[25] and that galant musical topics, or schemata, “constituted a musical medium of exchange between court artisans and their patrons”, whose “familiarity with the normal presentation of these schemata [determined] standards for judging musical propriety, invention, and taste.”[26] It is difficult for us—so indoctrinated as we are by the concept of self-contained, organic musical works—to imagine that the way of evaluating quality in music may have had more to do with the wittiness of a piece’s relationship with contemporaneous music, with the way it was fluidly related to other pieces, rather than its degree of pure originality and independence.

That stylistic archetypes took priority over pure originality prior in the eighteenth century has been argued before—not only in music by Gjerdingen and other topic theorists including Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu[27], but also in the visual arts, particularly by Maria Loh[28] and Vic Gatrell.[29] But I would like to go even further to assert that the delineation of musical time into discrete pieces during this period was more a matter of logistical convenience rather than ontological necessity, and that, therefore, HIPerformers need not necessarily obey the beginnings and endings of pieces any more than they need obey the archival groupings, namings, and orderings of pieces encountered in the archives. Furthermore, this non-existence of the external boundaries of musical pieces can also be read as a manifestation of a broader cultural appreciation for continuity or holism of which the aforementioned intermittent attention bouncing between various social activities is also a manifestation.

This is a principle yet to be fully assimilated in HIP concerts, and I do believe that it’s the first step forward, but I also believe the argument can be taken even further to where sections, phrases, and melodies from within any piece of the period may be extracted and reused in other contexts such that the re-circulatory quality of this period’s musical culture is re-enacted rather than reconstructed. If the present-day status quo of concert curation is the selecting and placing-in-order of musical works because, as Lydia Goehr has argued,[30] the musical work was the nineteenth-century’s de facto musical ontology, then historically-informed concert curation of eighteenth-century music should be the selecting and placing-in-order of stock musical phrases because, as Robert Gjerdingen has argued,[31] stock musical phrases were the eighteenth-century’s de facto musical ontology.

Additionally, if the objective of HIP is to convey some selective representation of the musical past to a present-day audience rather than to reconstruct the past in itself, there is no reason to give preference to the actual instances or rate of recurrence for particular pieces in historical concert programs, or to their form and development, for that matter. A contrived effort could be made to replicate the qualitative characteristic of those concerts as being comprised primarily of music that was simultaneously new (because of the rarity of canonization), unfamiliar (because of its newness), and familiar (because of its construction from archetypes and quotations). A new concert culture could be built not of complete historical works but of fragmentary historical materials employed in a re-circulatory fashion that resembles but is not identical to the ‘reality’ of the musical culture of eighteenth-century London. Such a culture would enable the unlimited production of novel eighteenth-century music; a restoration of eighteenth-century musical culture that conforms to its musical-ontological perspective and upholds its insatiable neophilia.

This overview of a highly complex and difficult problem area for HIP has been frustratingly shallow given the broad subject area I thought prudent to cover. My intention is not to solve the problem entirely but merely to identify it more carefully and prod in the general direction of possible solution areas. To conclude, however, I do want to offer some context and to demonstrate that we musicians are not alone in arguing over these difficult questions.

But first, I’d like to propose a new identity for HIP: historical argumentation in and through musical performance. The rationale for this is as follows. Contemporary historians don’t tell stories. They describe information, assert significance, and argue correlations. No one criticises contemporary historians because the exact combination of words and sentences they use to make their arguments never existed in the past because authenticity of that sort is irrelevant to historical argumentation, as opposed to historical reconstruction. And argumentation is the model model I propose for HIP in place of reconstruction.

A lot of work has been done over the past forty years to modify the definition and methodology of history according to critiques faced by objectivism and literalism in the middle of the twentieth century. This discourse problematizes the relationship of archival materials to historical events as well as the possibility for written language to produce objective description. Hayden Whites states that “history is the study, not of past events that are gone forever from perception, but rather of the “traces” of those events distilled into documents and monuments.”[32] And in dissecting the problem of the ambiguity and enigma of written language, Ann Stoler describes her “attempt to distinguish between what was ‘unwritten’ because it could go without saying and ‘everyone knew it,’ what was unwritten because it could not yet be articulated, and what was unwritten because it could not be said.”[33] White also problematizes the relationship between narrative development and the temporality experienced by historical agents. He argues that

[t]he narrativization of history … transforms every present into a “past future,” on the one side, and a “future past,” on the other. Considered as a transition between a past and a future, every present is at once a realization of projects performed by past human agents and a determination of a field of possible projects to be realized by living human agents in their future[34]

Considered this way, historical events are not fixed in time by the actuality of what people did but they become pliable because of the infinite different versions of what might lie ahead in the near future and what happened in the recent past that exist in the minds of historical people. These were the very same people who wrote the documents historians now study, and so their anxiety will be latent within any attempt to understand ‘the past itself’. Stoler describes that archival documents “are records of uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule correspond to a changing … world.”[35] This casting of uncertainty on the historical process is what I mean to do within HIP, and so possible ways forward for musicians are offered by assertions like Stoler’s to write histories of “failed projects, delusional imaginings, [and] equivocal explanations”[36] or Ferguson’s that “to understand how [the past] actually was, we … need to understand *how it actually wasn’t—*but how, to contemporaries, it might have been.”[37] There’s no longer anything stopping HIP from producing fantasies of music as it never was but might have been.

Within a HIP practice that identifies as argumentation rather than reconstruction the musician must still build an understanding of the musical past but is freed from total dependence on historical precedent. An argument is an equivocation, and so an argumentative performance will be heterogeneous. It can invite its listener not only to reflect on what the past sounded like but also on how it differs from the present, how it relates to the present, and how it relates to other plausible pasts. It can situate historical understanding in a broader field, in a more relevant way. To end, I’d like to share a quote by Mieke Bal from the recent discourse in museology about the concept of the transhistorical:

"Historians tend to think of anachronism as the worst mistake. […] It implies projecting a contemporary vision on a past for which that vision could not yet exist, and hence, cannot be relevant. Thus, it is historically naïve and it hampers insight into that past one seeks to understand. Anachronism, one might think, flattens time, makes everything resemble the present, and thus clouds the historical artworks with irrelevant considerations. Often, such criticisms are justified. I want to argue, however, [that] anachronisms can invigorate our interactions with historical objects. […] Anachronism allows us to be more, rather than less, loyal to the moment in time with which it establishes a discordant dialogue. If history is accounting for, explaining and giving meaning to, change over time, then anachronism is key to history. It is indeed the conditio sine qua non of recording, noticing, seeing change.[38]

If we dispose of the desire to reconstruct the past precisely in favor of the desire to convey what we understand about it to the listening public, if we accept that history is always a translation or imagination of the past rather than its exhibition, we will no longer face the conceptual problems of authenticity; we will be able to make complete, individualized, and passionate musical expressions; and we will be able to more effectively communicate both what we actually know about the musical past and what remains beyond our grasp.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Authentic,” Merriam-Webster.com, [https://merriam-webster.com], accessed 27 January 2019.

Michael Bentley, ‘Past and “Presence”: Revisiting Historical Ontology’ in History and Theory, vol. 45, no. 3 (October 2006).

Christine Boone, ‘Mashing: Toward a Typology of Recycled Music’ in Music Theory Online, vol. 19, no. 3 (September 2013), [http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.3/mto.13.19.3.boone.php], accessed 19 January 2019.

Peter Borsay, ‘Concert Topography and Provincial Towns in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Susan Wollenberg & Simon McVeigh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004).

John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Vanessa Chang, ‘Records That Play: The Present Past in Sampling Practice’ in Popular Music, vol. 28, no. 2 (May 2009), 143-159.

Niall Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador, 1997).

Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007).

Adrian George, The Curator’s Handbook (London: Thames & Hudson 2015).

Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford Universty Press, 2007).

Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).

Maria Loh, ‘New and Improved: Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory’ in The Art Bulletin, vol. 86, no. 3 (September 2004), 477-504.

Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Simon McVeigh, ‘Introduction’ in Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Susan Wollenberg & Simon McVeigh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004).

Danuta Mirka (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980).

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998).

Southbank Centre, ‘Pipedreams’, [https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/122482-pipedreams- 2018], accessed 27 January 2019.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Richard Taruskin. ‘Is There a Baby in the Bathwater? (Part II)’ in Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 63. Jahrg., H. 4. (2006), 309-327.

William Weber, ‘Did People listen in the 18th Century?’ in Early Music, vol. 25, no. 4 (November 1997), 678-691.

William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

James Webster. “Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History: ‘First Viennese Modernism’ and the Delayed Nineteenth Century” in 19th-Century Music, vol. 25, no. 2-3 (Fall-Spring 2001-2002), 108-126.

Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

Eva Wittocx, Ann Demeester, Peter Carpreau, Melanie Bühler, Xander Karskens (eds.), The Transhistorical Museum: Mapping the Field (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018).

FOOTNOTES

  1. Michael Bentley, ‘Past and “Presence”: Revisiting Historical Ontology’ in History and Theory, vol. 45, no. 3 (October 2006), 359. ↩︎

  2. Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 190. For primers on Taruskin’s, Leech-Wilkinson’s, and Butt’s positions, see Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘What we are doing with early music is genuinely authentic to such a small degree that the word loses most of its intended meaning’ in Early Music, vol. 12, no. 1 (February 1984), 13-16; and John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). ↩︎

  3. John Butt, Playing with History…, 65. ↩︎

  4. “Authentic,” Merriam-Webster, [https://merriam-webster.com], accessed 27 January 2019.

    The full definition reads: “true to one’s own personality, character, or spirit.” ↩︎

  5. Richard Taruskin frequently argues that the true value of the Early Music movement lies in its success in revitalizing inherited performance practices with new, Modernist versions, but this is not an argument that anyone has attempted to make publicly (outside of academia) because it undermines the movement’s most basic premise as historical:

    "More germane to the [Early Music] movement than the revival of period timbres was the extreme literalism with which the musical texts were interpreted, and it was very easy to show that this literalism was altogether anachronistic to the performance practice of any period earlier than the modernist one.

    *Paradoxically enough, however, I contended that this anachronism enhanced, rather than diminished, the claim that historical performers made to “authenticity,” since their literalism made them an authentic voice of their own time rather than a spurious voice of the past." *

    Richard Taruskin, ‘Is There a Baby in the Bathwater? (Part II)’ in Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 63. Jahrg., H. 4. (2006), 309. ↩︎

  6. The implication of Leopold von Ranke here is intentional. ↩︎

  7. Particularly Susan Wollenberg & Simon McVeigh (eds.), Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). ↩︎

  8. in William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). ↩︎

  9. in Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). ↩︎

  10. For some very interesting examples, see Eva Wittocx et al. (eds.), The Transhistorical Museum: Mapping the Field (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018). ↩︎

  11. Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007). ↩︎

  12. Southbank Centre, ‘Pipedreams’, [https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/122482-pipedreams- 2018], accessed 27 January 2019. ↩︎

  13. Adrian George, The Curator’s Handbook (London: Thames & Hudson 2015), 214. ↩︎

  14. Simon McVeigh, “Introduction” in Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1. ↩︎

  15. Ibid. 2-4. ↩︎

  16. Simon McVeigh, Concert life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60-61 ↩︎

  17. Ibid., 93. ↩︎

  18. Peter Borsay, ‘Concert Topography and Provincial Towns in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 31. ↩︎

  19. Ibid., 33 ↩︎

  20. described in detail in William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste. ↩︎

  21. According to William Weber, ‘Did People listen in the 18th Century?’ in Early Music, vol. 25, no. 4 (November 1997), 678-691. ↩︎

  22. James Webster, ‘Between Enlightenment and Romanticism in Music History: ‘First Viennese Modernism’ and the Delayed Nineteenth Century’ in 19th-Century Music, vo. 25, no. 2-3 (Fall-Spring 2001-2002), 122. ↩︎

  23. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 120. ↩︎

  24. Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford: Oxford Universty Press, 2007), 6. ↩︎

  25. Ibid., 15. ↩︎

  26. Ibid., 16. ↩︎

  27. For an introduction Mirka’s and Agawu’s positions, see Danuta Mirka (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ↩︎

  28. In Maria Loh, ‘New and Improved: Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory’ in The Art Bulletin, vol. 86, no. 3 (September 2004), pp.477-504. Loh’s topic is actually seventeenth-century visual art, but the way she describes its manner of communication with its audience is strikingly similar to the way topic theorists describe galant music. ↩︎

  29. In Gatrell, City of Laughter. His topic is ‘satirical’ prints of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which, he argues, are about creating unexpected and peculiar relationships between familiar characters, activities, and situations. ↩︎

  30. In Goehr, The Imaginary Museum… ↩︎

  31. In Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style. ↩︎

  32. Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 102. ↩︎

  33. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3. ↩︎

  34. White, The Content of the Form, 149. ↩︎

  35. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 4. ↩︎

  36. Ibid., 21. ↩︎

  37. Niall Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Picador, 1997), 86-7. ↩︎

  38. Mieke Bal, ‘Towards a Relational Inter-Temporality’ in The Transhistorical Museum: Mapping the Field ed. Eva Wittocx et al. (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2018), 60-61. ↩︎