Effacing Modernism, or How to Perform Less Accurately Through Listening

Abstract

This is a study of the effects of modernist aesthetics on the interpretation of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century piano music, with suggestions for reclaiming the most imaginative and effective habits of premodern performers by studying their recordings and imitating their styles. For anyone trying to grasp outmoded styles today, it is the “wayward” approaches to music we hear on early recordings that prove most challenging. Modernists fetishized the “urtext” in order to ensure exacting resemblances between notation and performance, but our trusted scores are of little help once we've entered the sound archive. No amount of description—in word or symbol—is sufficient even to suggest the breathtaking range of interpretation we encounter there. It all seems so heterodox, and in comparison far less accurate, but that is because performers <i>then</i> “knew the score” in quite another way. To put it negatively, the purge we've endured has rendered us incapable of admitting critical perspectives on interpretation that they utilized freely and artistically. Because the tightened grip of “good taste” effectively prohibited practices essential to the performance of premodern repertoire, there is a focus here on restoring those practices and on several remarkable recordings that exceed agreed-upon limits of “good taste” by a wide margin. As modernism metastasized, even the performances of its founders began to seem irresponsibly anarchic. Bartók is exemplary in this respect: his playing illuminates the degree to which artistry can transcend apparent strictures of notation and form when it has free access to all the old tools. Finally, the very fact that we uncover such a trove of unexpected sound within the meager historical limits of recording suggests that the inaudible past almost certainly hides substantial and important additions to practice about which we know little or nothing. Absent the corroboration of sound, we may invent new ones to replace them. These are the assumptions underlying some of the experiments encouraged here.