In Defense of Authentic Performance: Adjust Your Ears, not the Music

Abstract

The notion of authentic, or historically informed, performance, which had many champions in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, seems to have become rather suspect beginning in the 90s and continuing into the present, especially in some musicological circles. But one of the strongest briefs against such performance has been lodged by someone from my own circle, that of philosophical aesthetics, namely Peter Kivy, in his excellent book Authenticities (1995). In this essay, I attempt to defend authentic performance from Kivy’s critique, seeking to establish both the coherence of the concept of historically authentic performance and the value of the practice of historically authentic performance. The starting point of my essay is a survey of plausible goals of performing music in this way, with an eye to identifying those that are appropriate, realizable, and defensible, and setting aside those that are inappropriate, unrealizable, or indefensible. Historically authentic performance, properly construed, is a reasonable and desirable form of musical activity, and achieves a kind of value that no other mode of performance can. However this is not to deny that there are other values achieved by other modes of performance, nor that historical authenticity has to be understood in a flexible manner, nor that our epistemic access to it is in many cases highly circumscribed.