Rob C. Wegman quoted Richard Taruskin as saying (in part):
>... This kind of destructive authoritarianism is
>rampant in reviews of performances of medieval and Renaissance music,
>where just about any performance at all is open to the charge of 'mixing .
>. . musicology and make-believe', if that is the kind of tack the reviewer
>wishes to take. Professor Mendel himself, sad to say, made a habit of
>giving performers, in Grout's words quoted earlier, a 'bad conscience'
>about what they were doing, by challenging them to justify it on hard
>evidence. He presided over a terrifying workshop at the Josquin Festival
>Conference in 1971 on the performance of Josquin's Masses, and used the
>positivistic inductive method as a veritable stick to beat modern
>performers. No matter what they did, Professor Mendel could find some
>theorist or source to say them nay. Nor can I ever forget the time
>Professor Mendel travelled up to New York to hear Nikolaus Harnoncourt
>lecture at Columbia about his ideas on Bach performance. The professor
>played the grand inquisitor: 'But Mr Harnoncourt, do you *know* that's
>true?' he intoned again and again. Mr Harnoncourt could only splutter.
But this is silly (and I thank Rob Wegman for affording an opportunity
to respond to it). I was at that session in 1971 and have no
recollection of feeling terrorized by anything Arthur Mendel was
saying. Mendel, of course, didn't have the means to browbeat anyone
and probably never had any intention of doing so in the first place.
He merely was pointing out that certain assumptions then well
entrenched should not be mistaken for facts. This, it seems to me,
is nothing other than good musicology. If Harnoncourt was unable to
account for what he was doing, he had no one to blame for that but
himself.
Richard Wexler +------+ 1-301-405-5538 (w); 1-301-779-6906 (h) +-------+
| Musicology Division | University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 |
| Department of Music | E-mail: [log in to unmask] |
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