Table Of Content

Text and Act This page intentionally left blank TEXT and ACT Essays on Music and Performance RICHARD TARUSKIN New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1995 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1995 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taruskin, Richard. Text and act: essays on music and performance / Richard Taruskin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-509437-9. - ISBN 0-19-509458-1 |pbk.) 1. Performance practice (Music) 2. Style, Musical. I. Title. ML457.T37 1995 781.4'3-dc20 94-24903 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Author's Note, vii INTRODUCTION Last Thoughts First, 3 IN THEORY 1. On Letting the Music Speak for Itself, 51 2. The Limits of Authenticity: A Contribution, 67 3. Down with the Fence, 83 4. The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past, 90 5. What—or Where—Is the Original ? 15 5 6. The Modern Sound of Early Music, 164 7. Tradition and Authority, 173 IN PRACTICE Beethoven 8. The New Antiquity, 202 9. Resisting the Ninth, 235 Mozart 10. An Icon for Our Time, 263 11. A Mozart Wholly Ours, 273 12. Old (New) Instruments, New (Old) Tempos, 292 vi CONTENTS Bach 13. Backslide or Harbinger? 298 14. Facing up, Finally, to Bach's Dark Vision, 307 15. The Crooked Straight and the Rough Places Plain, 316 Antiquarian Innocence 16. Report from Lincoln Center: The International Josquin Festival- Conference, 21-25 June 1971, 322 17. The Price of Literacy, or, Why We Need Musicology, 344 18. High, Sweet, and Loud, 347 19. Text and Act, 353 Full Circle 20. Stravinsky Lite (Even "The Rite"), 360 Index, 369 Author's Note Every piece in this collection has been thoroughly reedited—to ex- punge redundancies, to correct the style, to refine or enrich the argument. If I am asking my readers to reread me, the least I can do is to offer them an improved text. Those encountering these pieces for the first time need never know what they have been spared. This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION

Description:

This collection of essays and reviews offers an evaluation of the early music movement, in an attempt to transform the debate about "early music" and "authenticity". Taking a wide-ranging cultural view of the phenomenon, it shows that the movement, far from reviving ancient traditions, in fact repre