Abstract
As a young boy, Robin George Collingwood would steal from his bed and sit on the stairs with his sisters shrouded in darkness secretly listening to his mother playing the piano below. In this way, he remembered in his autobiography, he became familiar with all the Beethoven sonatas and most of Chopin’s music.1 Music, it turns out, played not only an important role in Collingwood’s personal life, but was also central to his preliminary formulations of historical reenactment. The circles in which his father moved brought him into contact with what came to be known as the Early Music Revival pioneered in England by the eccentric French émigré, Arnold Dolmetsch. The influence of this movement, which centres on a historically considered reconstruction of music from a distant past, can be detected in his early writings on reenactment.
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Notes
R. G. Collingwood (1970 [1939]) An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press), p. 3.
F. Neumann (1989) New Essays on Performance Practice (Ann Arbor; London: UMI Research Press), p. 3.
See L. Goehr (1992) The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press).
L. Dreyfus (1983) ‘Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century’, Musical Quarterly, 69:3, p. 298.
W. M. Johnston (1967) The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood (The Hague: M. Nijhoff), p. 29.
R. G. Collingwood (1994) ‘Outlines of a Philosophy of History’ in The Idea of History with Lectures 1926–1928, ed. Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 438–95.
In his study of Collingwood’s idea of re-enactment, William Dray notes that a ‘peculiarity of his presentation of it at that point [in 1928] is his reporting that the idea first came to him while asking himself how one understands the present performance of a piece of music composed at some earlier time’. See W. Dray (1995) History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 33, 138–9.
D. H. Johnson (1994) ‘W. G. Collingwood and the Beginnings of the Idea of History’, in David Boucher (ed.), The Life and Thought of R. G. Collingwood, Collingwood Studies 1 (Swansea: R. G. Collingwood Society), p. 1.
E. Pound (1954) ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’, in T. S. Eliot (ed.) Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London: Faber), p. 434.
Ezra Pound recommended this book for inclusion in the Little Review Bookshop. See T. L. Scott, Melvin J. Friedman and J. R. Bryer (eds) (1988) Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence (New York: New Directions), p. 113.
M. Campbell (1975) Dolmetsch: The Man and His Work (London: Hamish Hamilton), p. 68.
D. H. Laurence (ed.) (1981) Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, vol. 3 (London: Max Reinhardt, The Bodley Head), p. 62.
F. MacCarthy (1994) William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber), pp. 668–9.
H. Haskell (1988) The Early Music Revival: A History (London: Thames and Hudson), p. 29.
E. Pound (1985) I Cantos (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore), p. 1018.
J. Joyce, (1936) Ulysses (London: J. Lane), p. 1082.
G. Moore (1898) Evelyn Innes (London: T. Fisher Unwin), available at http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/gutenberg/1/3/2/0/13201/13201-h/13201-h.htm#CHAPTER_ONE.
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s concept of the intentional fallacy has been used by those problematizing this approach. See for example, L. Treitler (2003) With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It was Made (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
J. Kerman (Winter 1992) ‘The Early Music Debate: Ancients, Moderns, Postmoderns’, Journal of Musicology, 10:1, p. 113.
N. Kenyon (August 2004) ‘The Historical Imagination’, Early Music, 32:3, p. 459.
See N. Kenyon (ed.) (1988) Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
P. Kivy (1995) Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
R. Taruskin (1995) ‘Last Thoughts First’ in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 5.
Ibid., p. 6. His ferocity has coloured his titles. See for example, R. Taruskin (1984) ‘The Authenticity Movement can become a Positivist Purgatory, Literalistic and Dehumanizing’, Early Music, 12:1, pp. 3–12.
J. Kerman (1985) Musicology (London: Fontana Press), p. 200.
A. Dolmetsch (1969) The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 3rd edn (Seattle: University of Washington Press), p. vii.
W. Landowska (1924) Music of the Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), p. 175.
T. Livingston (1999) ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory’, Ethnomusicology, 43:1, p. 76.
J. Rockwell (Winter 1992) ‘The Early Music Debate: Ancients, Moderns, Postmoderns’, Journal of Musicology, 10:1, p. 123.
Kenyon embraced these ‘postmodern’ performance for offering ‘new freedoms for the way we absorb, internalize and re-create historical information’ and identified them as ‘a fruitful subject for the next decade of research. In 2007, Nancy November identified ‘a newer attitude’ in historical performance, one that ‘recognizes that the task of “cleaning away” performance traditions is impossible and that such an attempt is even undesirable’. In the same year, Bruce Haynes devoted a monograph to historically informed performance with a similar thesis at its core. See Kenyon, ‘The Historical Imagination’, p. 459–60; N. November (2007) ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes?: “Period” Beethoven and Performance Traditions’, Early Music, 35:3, p. 488; B. Haynes (2007) The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
D. Fabian (2001) ‘The Meaning of Authenticity and the Early Music Movement: A Historical Review’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 32:2, p. 159.
S. Burstyn (1986) ‘Authentic Listening?’, Orbis musicae, ix, pp. 141–9
S. Burstyn (1998)’ Music as Heard’, Early Music, 26:3, pp. 515
S. Burstyn (1998) ‘Pre-1600 Music Listening: A Methodological Approach, Musical Quarterly (Special Issue: ‘Music as Heard’), 82:3/4, pp. 455–65.
L. Botstein (1998) ‘Toward a History of Listening’, Musical Quarterly (Special Issue: ‘Music as Heard’), 82:3/4, pp. 427–31.
See U. Eco (2004) ‘Lingue Perfette e Colori Imperfetti’, in Dire Quasi La Stessa Cosa (Milan: Bompiani), pp. 345–53.
Haskell, The Early Music Revival, p. 43. Michael Morrow suggests widening this approach, believing that ‘by reading the classics, looking at paintings and sculpture and attending theatre... we can share — though in a limited manner — the feelings, emotions and ideas of men of other ages and other civilizations’. ‘But’, he hastens to remind us, ‘we must never forget that in any age the artist is addressing himself to his contemporaries, and his language is composed of a system of familiar conventions — musical, visual or literary. If we don’t or can’t learn these languages, the conventions will be as meaningless to us as the hand gestures of an Indian dancer are to the average western audience’. See M. Morrow (1978) ‘Musical Performance and Authenticity’, Early Music, 6:2, p. 233.
V. Agnew (2007) ‘History’s Affective Turn: Historical Re-enactment and Its Work in the Present’, Rethinking History, 11:3, p. 299.
C. Dahlhaus (1983) Foundations of Music History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 63.
For an elucidation of this idea of estrangement, which has much in common with the Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung, see V. Shklovsky (1990) Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press).
R. Norrington (February 2004) ‘The Sound Orchestras Make’, Early Music, 32:1, p. 2.
R. Philip (1992) Early Recording and Musical Style, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
E. Ornoy (2006) ‘Between Theory and Practice: Comparative Study of Early Music Performances’, Early Music, 34:2, pp. 233–47.
N. Temperley (February 1984) ‘The Movement Puts a Stronger Premium on Novelty than on Accuracy, and Fosters Misrepresentation’, Early Music, 12:1, p. 18.
Haskell, The Early Music Revival, p. 176–7. See also D. Leech-Wilkinson (2002) The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press).
R. Wistreich (2007) ‘Lost Voices’, Early Music, 35:3, p. 457.
Haskell, The Early Music Revival, p. 177. Later in the 1980s, Taruskin still warned of the dangers of ‘time-travel nostalgia’. See R. Taruskin (1982) ‘On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance’, Journal of Musicology, 1:3, p. 342.
Dreyfus, ‘Early Music Defended against Its Devotees’, p. 305. Robert Morgan, a specialist in twentieth-century music, understands the rejection of new music for new ways of looking at the past as expressing a general anxiety about the state of contemporary art music. Historical performance movement, he believes, has in effect usurped the place of new music. See R. Morgan (1988) ‘Tradition, Anxiety, and the Current Musical Scene’ in Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early Music, pp. 57–82. Joshua Kosman also believes that historical performance has,’ substituted archaeology for new creation’. See J. Kosman (Winter 1992), ‘The Early Music Debate: Ancients, Moderns, Postmoderns’, Journal of Musicology, 10:1, p. 119.
L. Treitler (1990) ‘History and Music’, New Literary History, 21:2, p. 318.
B. D. Sherman (2003) Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 7.
Kenyon notes that historical performance has ‘infiltrated mainstream performance’ and broadened its expressive and timbral palette. See Kenyon, ‘The Historical Imagination’, p. 450. Stanley Ritchie makes a similar observation that mainstream performers have been, ‘influenced by the revelation of earlier esthetic principles, and although it might not always be practical for them to play on original instruments, they are often open to revising certain interpretative ideas, such as tempo choice, phrasing style and use of the long-forgotten art of embellishment’. See S. Ritchie (Autumn 1984) ‘Authentic Reconstruction of Musical Performance: History and Influence’, The Drama Review, 28:3, p. 73.
C. Price (November 1997) ‘Early Music: Listening Practice and Living Museums’, Early Music, 25:4, p. 561.
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© 2010 Kate Bowan
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Bowan, K. (2010). R. G. Collingwood, Historical Reenactment and the Early Music Revival. In: McCalman, I., Pickering, P.A. (eds) Historical Reenactment. Reenactment History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277090_9
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