A Musicology of Performance Theory and Method Based on Bach's Solos for Violin
Dorottya Fabian
Publisher: Open Book Publishers Year of publication: 2015 Published on OpenEdition Books: 1 June 2017 Serie: OBP collection Electronic ISBN: 9782821881723
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A MUSICOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE
A Musicology of Performance
Theory and Method Based on Bach’s Solos for Violin
Dorotya Fabian http://www.openbookpublishers.com © Dorottya Fabian Version 1.1. Minor edits made, October 2015. Version 1.2. Minor edits made, June 2016
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Dorottya Fabian, A Musicology of Performance Theory and Method Based on Bach s Solos for Violin. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.11647/OBP.0064 Please see the list of images and audio examples for attribution relating to individual resources. Whenever a license is not specified, these resources have been released under the same license as the book. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected upon notification to the publisher. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www. openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741526#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ All external links were active on 31/06/2016 unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web The Australian Academy of the Humanities has generously contributed to the publication of this volume. Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www. openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741526#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-152-6 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-153-3 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-154-0 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-155-7 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-156-4 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0064 Cover image: Juan Gris, ‘Violin’ (1913), http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Juan_Gris_-_ Violin.jpg All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.
Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers In memory of my father, Otto Somorjay. Your appreciation of performing musicians and your love of listening to music have been life-long inspirations. Thank you!
Contents
Acknowledgments i
1. Dancing to Architecture? 1 1.1 The Problems of Researching and Writing about Music 3 Performance Problems with Historical Investigations of Music Performance 7 Is HIP a Modern Invention/Aesthetic or Does it Have Historical 12 Grounding? Data versus Narrative–Letting Go of Dancing or Returning to the 13 Dance Floor? 1.2 Summary: Recordings, Aims and Method 17
2. Theoretical Matters 25 2.1 Cultural Theories 28 HIP and Modernism 28 Modernism versus Postmodernism 31 HIP as a Mirror of Cultural Change 35 Aesthetics and Value Judgment: Beauty and the Sublime 39 2.2 Analytical Theories 42 Music Performance Studies 42 Empirical and Psychological Studies of Performance 48 2.3 Music Performance and Complex Systems 51 Gilles Deleuze and Difference in Music Performance 52 Music Performance as Complex Dynamical System 56 2.4 Performance Studies, Oral Culture and Academia 61 Research Roles: Performing Music or Analysing Performance? 62 Oral Cultures and the Aurality of Music Performance 65 Keeping Music Performance in the Aural Domain 69 Academia Once More 71 2.5 Conclusion 73 3. Violinists, Violin Schools and Emerging Trends 75 3.1 Violinists 76 3.2 Violin Schools 87 3.3 The Influence of HIP on MSP 95 3.4 Diversity within Trends and Global Styles 106 3.5 Overall Findings and Individual Cases 116 Trends in Particular Movements 118 The Importance of Ornamentation 120 3.6 Conclusion 122
4. Analyses of Performance Features 127 4.1 Tempo Choices 130 4.2 Vibrato 137 4.3 Ornamentation 146 Problems of Aesthetics and Notation Practices 146 The Role of Delivery 149 The Performance of Embellishments 153 Diversity—Once More 166 Ornamenting or Improvising? 169 Summary 170 4.4 Rhythm 172 Dotted Rhythms 173 Rhythmic Alteration 181 Rhythm and Musical Character 183 4.5 Bowing, Articulation and Phrasing 184 Bowing and Timbre 184 Multiple Stops 190 Phrasing and Dynamics 193 4.6 Conclusions 197
5. Affect and Individual Difference: Towards a Holistic Account 201 of Performance 5.1 Differences within the MSP and within the HIP Styles 202 The Loure 202 MSP Interpretations 203 HIP Interpretations 206 The Gavotte en Rondeau 207 HIP: Wallfisch and Huggett 208 MSP: Lev and Girngolts 210 Menuet I-II 211 5.2 Multiple Recordings of Violinists 217 Gidon Kremer 218 Rachel Barton Pine 221 Christian Tetzlaff 223 Sigiswald Kuijken 229 Viktoria Mullova 230 5.3 The Holistic Analysis of Interpretations 233 “Subjective” Aural Analysis: The D minor Giga 234 “Objective” Measures: 238 The A minor Grave and G minor Adagio Perception of Affect 241 5.4 Idiosyncratic Versions and Listeners’ Reactions 247 Thomas Zehetmair 247 Monica Huggett 251 The E Major Preludio 254 5.5 Conclusions 268
6. Conclusions and an Epilogue: The Complexity Model of Music 273 Performance, Deleuze and Brain Laterality 6.1 Summary 286 6.2 Where to from Here?—Epilogue 287 The Brain and its Two Worlds 288
List of Audio Examples 297 List of Tables 303 List of Figures 305 Discography 307 References 313 Index 333
Acknowledgments
The publication of the book was assisted by subventions from the Australian Academy of Humanities and the School of the Arts and Media of UNSW Australia. This project has also been supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP0879616) and a UNSW Australia Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Special Studies program in 2010, during which I took up a visiting fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge University which proved an ideal environment for focused work. In 2014 I received some tutoring and marking relief from the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW that contributed significantly to my ability to bring this project to a close. I would like to thank my research assistants Bridget Kruithof, Elizabeth Cooney, Hae-Na Lee and Amanda Harris for help with data collection and some measurements; Daniel Bangert, Jennifer Butler, Daniel Leech- Wilkinson, Eitan Ornoy, Sean Pryor, Dario Sarlo, and Emery Schubert for insightful and corrective comments on earlier drafts; Kumaran Arul for encouragement and Ellen Hooper for stimulating discussions about performance research and Deleuze; two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions; Rachel Barton-Pine for her generosity in providing me with recordings of her concerts; and Alessandra Tosi and Bianca Gualandi of the superb editorial team at Open Book Publishers who helped make the multi-media presentation possible. I thank Corin Throsby for preparing the index. Although I prepared a rough draft in 2011, due to other work commitments I could not return to it until 2014, so this book has had a long gestation and underwent substantial rethinking and re-writing. Sections, mostly on ornamentation and the interaction between period and mainstream playing styles have been presented at various academic ii A Musicology of Performance gatherings. I wish to note my gratitude to Jane Davidson (University of Western Australia, Perth), Gary McPherson (Music, Mind and Wellbeing, University of Melbourne, Australia), Clive Brown and David Milsom (Leeds University), Ingrid Pearson (Royal College of Music, London), Jane Ginsborg (Royal Northern College of Music Manchester) for the invitations. Thanks are also due to the organizers of conferences in Aveiro (Portugal) and at the Orfeus Institute (Ghent), for the opportunity to present, and to the audiences for valuable questions and comments. An article on ornamentation in recent recordings of J. S. Bach’s Solos for Violin was published in Min-ad, the Israeli Musicological Society’s peer-reviewed journal. I thank them for kindly allowing me to re-use some of that material in chapter four of this book. I would also like to record the generosity of John Butt, Janice Stockigt, Samantha Owens, and Neal Peres da Costa who wrote supporting letters to the Australian Academy of Humanities when I applied to them for a publications subvention. Thank you!
I am grateful to Katalin Komlós for noting some additional misprints and notation errors in one of the score examples and thank Open Book Publishers, especially Bianca Gualandi, for their prompt action in correcting them for edition 1.2 (June 2016). 1. Dancing to Architecture?
Framing all the great music out there only drags down its immediacy. […] Writing about music is like dancing about architecture—it’s a really stupid thing to want to do. Elvis Costello (b. 1954), singer-songwriter1
Starting this book with such a quote is not just a flippant rhetorical device. It flags my very strongly felt unease regarding the subject matter of the undertaking and my research in general. It is not that I agree with music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), who famously began his thesis The Art of Performance by stating that “a composition does not require a performance in order to exist. […] The reading of the score is sufficient,”2 thus similarly negating the importance of his topic. No, I believe all perception of music is performative whether it is reading a score, hearing with one’s inner ears, imagining, playing and singing, or listening to someone else performing. I even contend that when we say “music,” when Elvis Costello speaks of “great music,” we think of performances, sounds that “live” in our bodies, in our memories. We do not think of inscriptions on pages (scores) even if we are speaking of western art music with its long tradition of notated, authored compositions. And this is exactly why it is so difficult—if not stupid—to talk or write about it. When we do, we are trying to express in words that is in effect, a subjective, physical-affective experience. So a better question might be, “Why is it that we cannot readily recover for our ordinary speech what is so tantalizingly offered
1 Cited from Quote Investigator Exploring the Origins of Quotations (“Writing about Music is like Dancing about Architecture”), available at http://www.quoteinvestigator.com 2 Heinrich Schenker, TheArt of Performance , ed. by Heribert Esser, trans. by Irene Schreier Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 3.
© Dorotya Fabian, CC BY htp //dx.doi.org/ . /OBP. . A Musicology of Performance by practice?”3 If this question seems sensible then we have identified the reason why we need a musicology of performance. Musicology—a discipline invented in nineteenth-century Austria and Germany along the analogies of philology, historical and literary studies— has traditionally been concerned with the written text of music. To a great extent it still is. However, over the past few decades there has been an exponential growth in scholarship that focuses on music performance. The contention of this book is that we need a better theoretical framework for such studies; a framework that enables engagement with this richly complex phenomenon so that “talking about music” may be regarded less like “dancing to architecture,” less of “a stupid thing to want to do.” The theoretical framework and analytical approaches I propose in this book are for studying musical performance. They do not shift the thinking about music to the different paradigm advocated by Nicholas Cook: music as performance.4 I am interested in a musicology that might assist us to deconstruct the complex that music performance entails: the act and its perception, the aesthetic and the technical, the cultural and the historical, the personal and the common. Therefore I propose a model that engages not only with the various elements and aspects but, importantly, with the interactions of these. I argue that music performance shows overwhelming similarities to the characteristics of complex dynamical systems. We may gain a better understanding of its layers and the functioning of its contributing elements if we approach it with an adequately complex method. I will demonstrate this by studying forty recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (BWV1001-BWV1006, dated 1720) made during the past thirty years or so. In this introductory chapter I will first outline the problems we face when studying classical music performance as well as some of the specific questions and debates that relate to playing music composed almost 300 years ago. In the second part of the chapter I will introduce my material and outline how I proceed in the rest of the book.
3 Bruno Latour, Pandora s Hope Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 266. 4 Nicholas Cook, ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance,’ Music Theory Online, 7/2 (April 2001), 1-12, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/ mto.01.7.2.cook.html . Dancing to Architecture? 3
1.1. Problems in Researching and Writing about Music Performance
Music perception is multi-modal, whence it lays the crux of our problem. The role of visual, spatial and kinaesthetic inputs and sensations has been repeatedly demonstrated. What we hear depends on the context, on what we see, on our disposition and health, and our prior experiences and knowledge; on our mental and muscle memory, and the function of mirror neurons, not to mention “species-saving” mechanisms of evolutionary significance.5 Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) considered perception an extraordinarily creative mental act while Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908- 1961) called for a more “holistic theory incorporating embodiment and action.”6 The music theorists David Lewin argued that “musical perception was a type of skill, built over time, which can manifest in an infinite number of creative responses.”7 He claimed that it was erroneous and leading to false dichotomies to “suppose that we are discussing one phenomenon at one location of phenomenological space-time when in fact we are discussing many phenomena at many distinct such locations.”8 It is indeed difficult to accept the view that our perceptual experiences may be understood on cognitive terms alone. However, it is equally difficult to be convinced by models that discount the role of cognitive processes and endeavour to explain everything in neurological or evolutionary terms. As Merleau-Ponty noted, “the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body […].”9 Or, as Günther Stern [Anders] (1929-1930) opined, “When listening to music we are out of the world and in music.”10
5 Anthony Gritten, ‘The Subject (of) Listening,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 45/3 (2015), 203-219; Ian Cross and Iain Morley, ‘The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions and the Nature of the Evidence,’ Communicative Musicality Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship , ed. by Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 61-81. 6 Brian Kane, ‘Excavating Lewin’s “Phenomenology,”’ Music Theory Spectrum, 33 (2011), 27-36. 7 Kane, ‘Excavating,’ p. 27. 8 Here and elsewhere italics in original unless otherwise stated. David Lewin, ‘Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,’ Music Perception, 3/4 (Summer 1986), 327-392 (p. 357). 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962 [1945]), p. 167 cited in Kane, ‘Excavating,’ p. 33. 10 Günther Stern [Anders], ‘Philosophische Untersuchungen zu musikalischen Situationen,’ A Musicology of Performance
This sounds rather romantic, does it not?—even though it goes beyond the romantic notion of music communicating the inexpressible. Anders’ formulation, as I see it, implies that listening to music is inwardly in direction. It is internalized (unlike sight that canvasses the outside world); it has no objective subject, and in this regard John Lennon’s quip might ring quite true as it evokes another very internalized and personal experience: “Listen, writing about music is like talking about fucking. Who wants to talk about it? But you know, maybe some people do want to talk about it.”11 The “talking about” music performance has long been the domain of music critics on the one hand, and music psychologist on the other hand, both with characteristics that duly raises the question of “why bother.” The former deals in metaphorical description and tends to reflect normative thinking. Given the space limits of most magazines and dailies, reviews tend to be very short, having no room for detailed observation or definition of subjective terms. More recently they often include phrases to the effect, “you really need to hear the disk, it is not possible to describe it properly.” The latter, that is music psychology, is driven by empiricism and laboratory testing. As such it is limited to what it can measure and test. Although recent developments in technology make their investigations increasingly sophisticated and influenced by neuro-science, the tendency to look for universals through what is measurable yields results of moderate interest to musicians and lovers of music. These studies are not really concerned with either the phenomenological experience or the aesthetic-affective impact of technical and stylistic differences. And when they do, the results do not necessarily provide particularly penetrating new insights. Instead, they simply confirm what practicing musicians have known for long through practice.12 For example, they have rightly noted the importance of visual cues in music performance and drew attention to it when most investigations focused on audio-only formats—both in terms of performer-to performer communication and, more importantly, perhaps, for listeners’ enjoyment and aesthetic judgement.13 By now, however, psychological research into
typescript, Österreichisches Literaturarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Nachlass Günther Anders. ÖLA 237/04, p. 6 cited in Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance A History of Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 312. 11 From an Interview with Playboy magazine in 1980. Cited in http://www. quoteinvestigator.com [‘Writing about music is like dancing to architecture’]. 12 The reasons for the musician’s frustration with these studies is discussed, for instance, in J. Murphy McCaleb’s recent book Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 13 One of the first researcher of the visual aspect (body movements, appearance, etc.) of music performance was Jane W. Davidson, see, for instance, her ‘What Type of . Dancing to Architecture? 5 the multi-modal perception of music performance seems to be focusing on anything but the aural sensation and perception, as witnessed at a highly successful conference on the topic held at the University of Sheffield in March 2015. Yet musical gestures—aurally perceived gestures as well as gestures made visible to the mind through aural stimulus—are crucial in the affective communication between performer and listener, between “the music” and the perceiver. I mention gesture because it is a “hot topic” nowadays. Three edited books have been published on music and gesture in the past ten years and they provide important propositions that would benefit from systematic psychological, cognitive or neurological investigations.14 Several of the contributing writers address the multi-modal and experiential perception of music. Rolf Godøy, for instance notes that “music perception is embodied in the sense that it is closely linked with bodily experience” and it “is multi- modal in the sense that we perceive music with the help of both visual/ kinematic images and effort/dynamics sensations, in addition to the ‘pure’ sound.”15 Tapping into the mentioned debate between the Husserlian emphasis on “cognitive processes” and the Merleau-Pontian emphasis on the embodied sensation, that “thought and sensation as such occur only against a background of perceptual activity that we always already understand in bodily terms,”16 Godøy states that “ecological knowledge in listening, [means] knowledge acquired through massive experience of sound-sources in general and musical performances in particular.” He adds: “[…] the main point is […] not so much the kinematics (the gesture trajectory shapes that we see) as it is the dynamics of movement (the sensation of effort that we feel through our embodied capacity for mental simulation of the action of others).”17
Information is Conveyed in the Body Movements of Solo Musician Performers?,’ Journal of Human Movement Studies , 6 (1994), 279-301. 14 Music and Gesture and New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006 and 2011). See also Musical Gestures Sound, Movement, and Meaning, ed. by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Lehman (New York and London: Routledge, 2010). 15 Rolf Inge Godøy, ‘Gestural Affordances of Musical Sound,’ In Musical Gestures Sound, Movement, and Meaning, ed. by Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Lehman (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 103-125 (p. 106). 16 Taylor Carman, ‘The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,’ Philosophical Topics, 27/2 (1999), 205-226 (p. 206), cited in Kane, ‘Excavating,’ p. 33. 17 Godøy, ‘Gestural Affordances,’ p. 118, referring to Vittorio Gallese and Thomas Metzinger, ‘Motor ontology: The Representational Reality of Goals, Actions and selves,’ Philosophical Psychology, 16/3 (2003), 365-338. A Musicology of Performance
In a similar vein, Lawrence Zbikowski proposes the possibility of “no correlation between the gesture and the sound that produced it” and argues that “gesture [and music] give access to a dynamics, imagistic mode of thought that is inaccessible to language.”18 As such it may function like a metaphor by reflecting “a conceptual mapping” of knowledge in one domain to the experience in another domain. The multi-modal perception of music and the subjectivity of meaning are underlined by such assertions, and highlight the difficulties commentators on music performance face. Yet our fascination is such that we do not give up easily. The dance to architecture goes on. Focusing on actual rather than metaphorical gestures but similarly building on James Gibson’s ecological theory of hearing and listening,19 Luke Windsor argues: “Gestures are actions that musicians make, and the supreme virtue of music in this respect is that it can make audible gestures that are near invisible.”20 I propose that deciphering these gestures that are made audible by music is a key to a better understanding of aural modes of communication, of our capacity for “imagistic thought” that are visible only to our minds but triggered by sound. We want to talk about music because we are fascinated by our experience and want to understand why and how these strongly felt reactions come about. A comprehensive approach to the study of music performance is therefore important. It paves the road towards such insights. How, in what manner does sound specify the actions of performers and how do these aural cues give meaning to the musical experience? My analyses will aim to answer these questions step by step. First looking at the separate performance elements and then contemplating their contribution to the overall effect. Given our multi-modal, cognitive as well as embodied and affective perception of music, analysis must attempt to consider cues not in isolation but in their complex, non-linear and dynamic interactions with each-other as well as with both the performer’s and the listener’s historical-cultural disposition. This complexity hints at the biggest
18 Lawrence M. Zbikowski, ‘Musical Gesture and Musical Grammar: A Cognitive Approach,’ in New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 83-98 (pp. 84, 97). 19 James Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (London: Unwin Bros, 1966); idem, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1979). 20 Windsor, Luke W., ‘Gesture in Music-making: Action, Information and Perception,’ in New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 45-66 (p. 63). . Dancing to Architecture? 7 problem experimental investigations of music performance face: for such an understanding “we must imagine a hearing that involves no lapse of attention and a perfect operation of all the faculties—sensation, memory, understanding, imagination, and so on. In an actual, empirical hearing it is difficult to imagine such perfection.”21 In contrast, in an analytical, contemplative framework that relies on rich, empirically derived data and a transdisciplinary approach the chances seem better to achieve this goal. It is this kind of musicology of performance that I propose.
Problems with Historical Investigations of Music Performance
It is not only the multi-modal nature of our engagement with music that causes problems in investigations of musical performance. There are also the historical, cultural and aesthetic dimensions to be accounted for. How and why does a performance evolve? How and why do styles of interpretation change? How do performers interact with the past and the present; how do they influence each-other? Are stylistic practices developing through communities sharing aesthetic sensibilities, geographical location, cultural or educational history? What is the current scene of performing the music of Bach like compared to earlier times? Are there trends and if so, who are the trend setters? The availability of more than one hundred years of recordings makes such investigations possible. In fact the study of sound recordings as evidence of changing performing styles has been a growing field of musicological investigation since the mid-1990s. The explosion of digital reissues of old recordings at the end of the twentieth century suddenly put the history of music performance on centre stage as hundreds of items from early catalogues have had again become easily accessible. These provided fascinating and undeniable evidence for considerable changes in the interpretations of canonical compositions within the European concert tradition. Normative thinking regarding how Beethoven, or Bach, or any other composer’s music “should go” was challenged, eventually leading to Nicholas Cook’s call for a re-evaluation of the framing of musicological investigations to be not music as text (scores, compositions), but music as performance. Or how I prefer to think about it: music as sound.
21 Christopher Hasty, ‘The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music,’ in Sounding the Virtual Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 1-22 (p. 5). A Musicology of Performance
Anything that develops so rapidly brings with it the danger of “running ahead of itself.” Understandably, historians have focused on the earlier recordings and on the playing of musicians of bygone eras. Many of them (e.g. Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Beniamino Gigli, Tito Gobbi, Adelina Patti, Pablo Casals, Ignacy Jan Paderewsky, Alfred Cortot, the Lehner Quartet, Willam Mengelberg, Bruno Walter, to name a few) are legendary and becoming familiar with their artistry is not only informative regarding earlier styles of playing or singing but also satisfies curiosity. But a narrative of the history of twentieth-century performance styles that is based primarily on studying earlier musicians while relying on impressionistic information regarding more recent or living artists, leads to false conclusions. In this book I aim to supplement this near singular focus of detailed research on early recordings and pre-war artists by similarly engaged, systematic work on current musicians. This is important to do for an accurate picture to emerge and to prevent potentially unwarranted conclusions regarding a “golden age” (that is, pre-1930s) from taking hold.22 A lack of sufficient balance in scholarly attention may also foster premature notions about the roles various stakeholders and cultural- historical-social forces play in the development of performing styles and interpretative approaches. I will explore these at length in the next chapter. So here I only introduce some of the key issues that are problematic and need further investigation. A commonly expressed view is that the recording industry has fostered a de-personalisation of musical expression through its demand for technical perfection and repeatability, that performances have become much less individual than they used to be during the proverbial “golden age” prior to and at the beginning of sound recordings.23 Theorists of music performance in the second half of the twentieth century also seem to be of
22 The only study I am aware of that focuses on the performance characteristics of a more recent musician is Kevin Bazzana’s brilliant book, Glenn Gould