Todd McComb responded:

>Richard Wexler writes:
>>I'd say that both are in the service of the music.

>This is a big statement.  What is the music?  I claim that, from
>one perspective, the music is what the performer creates and what
>the musicologist studies.  Note the pre- and post- placements of
>the disciplines, although of course the interaction between the
>two makes it not so tidy.

I didn't intend to make any sweeping claims in saying this.  I only
meant whatever the music at hand happens to be.  But the musicologist
doesn't very often study what the performer creates.  More usually
it's what the composer creates.  Since most of the time neither the
performer nor the musicologist is present at the creation, it becomes
the task of both to discover a coherent interpretation.  The
musicologist seeks evidence of some kind that can be presented to the
performer, while the performer uses imagination and perhaps even
experimentation to develop a performance that might inspire the
musicologist to look in new places for evidence.  I hope that's the
kind of interaction you're getting at.

>I agree that this is what is meant by "HIP".  But how informed is
>"informed" to be?  At what point does the performer stop reading
>and start performing?  There can be no easy answer to this question.

But the answer is indeed very easy, I think:  Fully informed.  When
the performer runs out of things to read, the performance can begin.
There isn't so much written about any particular repertory that at
least the basic literature on it is too much to take in.

>Although I agree that this is basically what HIP is, I do disagree
>that this is the only means by which music is well-served.

And I don't disagree with you about this.  There are many
interpretations I continue to enjoy hearing despite their being not
tremendously well informed historically, usually because they sound so
musically intelligent.  Glen Gould's Bach, for example.  But there are
also many things not in that category.

>>How is it becoming less true that the two disciplines are aligned?

>For some time, there were no performance traditions of "med-and-ren-music",
>and so it could not be approached at all without the aid of the
>musicologist.  There was no sense of what even the notes & rhythms
>meant.  This is now mostly untrue, and instead we argue about
>ornamentation and other aspects (which I do find interesting
>historically as well as in other ways).  It is especially untrue
>that there is no longer a performance tradition for med-and-ren-music
>and so, quite blatantly, the performer can follow that tradition
>without speaking to the musicologist at all.

This sounds plausible, but in reality I don't think it is.  Did Arnold
Dolmetsch have ready access to musicologists?  (Well, maybe Fuller-
Maitland, to some extent.)  Who supported Nadia Boulanger during the
recording of the _Anthologie sonore_?  What musicologists did Noah
Greenberg consult?  I think he may have modelled the NY Pro Musica on
what Safford Cape was doing in Belgium.  But I wasn't saying I thought
performers ought to *speak* to musicologists -- and I believe they
mostly haven't.  What I'd like them to do is to read what we publish.
Then, if they disagree with what we're saying, let them follow their
own muses.  But at least they'll be informed.

>>What's counter-productive to art is ignorance

>I disagree with this.  Art requires insight, but it does not require
>a cosmopolitan completeness of scope.  For instance, their isolation
>is precisely one reason that native traditions in other cultures
>can be so stimulating to us today.

The analogy between the recreation of mostly forgotten historical
traditions of performance and the native traditions of other cultures
has limited validity, it seems to me.  If a performer of medieval or
Renaissance music chooses to adopt performance practices of other
cultures, I want to know why he or she considers it appropriate.  I'm
sure there are good reasons for sometimes doing this kind of thing,
but it's not enough to imply that that's the way they do it in
Corsica, which everyone knows is a backwards place.  (I may well be
badly misrepresenting Marcel Peres in saying this, but I hope you can
see what I'm getting at.)

>Again, regarding the alignment, it has been generally true that
>more informed performances have simply been better... more nuanced,
>more emphatic, simply more interesting.  Now we see performances
>which are also interesting but not as authentic, as per the subject
>of this thread.  In other words, aesthetics is falling out of line
>with musicology.  It does not say that musicology no longer has
>anything to contribute, but I do think that the two major triumphs
>of musicology have been both the historical education (which I
>regard as inherently good, but orthogonal to art as such) and most
>especially the rediscovery of some *very good ideas* used in the
>past.  These ideas are good for "the music" because they are good
>ideas, and for no other reason.

If I were making a recording of medieval or Renaissance music, I'd
like to think I was aspiring to being more than merely interesting.
But, as you say, aesthetics is falling out of line with musicology --
and with everything else, for that matter.  It seems to be
disappearing almost entirely as a consideration of any kind.

Regarding your remark about musicology's being responsible for the
rediscovery of some very good ideas, it seems to me you're be-
traying a certain lack of awareness of what musicology's real
accomplishment has been, that being nothing less that the rediscovery
of the music itself.  Even I can remember (and I'm not that ancient)
when what well informed people thought of as music began and almost
ended with the "Three B's."

>More familiarity with the music, as jump-started by musicology,
>facilitates "good ideas" forming from other directions.  This is
>what happens, and it will go on happening.  What makes these ideas
>good is precisely the same nebulous human interaction which makes
>any art good, and the only sense in which "authenticity" is above
>the fray is the very restrictive sense of "historical education".

Here we're on the same wave length, I think.

>>As for Harnoncourt, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for him.

>I have no particular knowledge of this scene, and so do not mean
>to imply that I am discussing it.  I agree that in a musicology
>conference, one should be prepared to discuss within the framework
>of musicology.

I wasn't there, but I don't think it was a conference.  It may have
been instead a lecture he delivered to Columbia students, many of
whom, like Taruskin, would have been studying musicology.

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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