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2018 Expressions of Integrity: Baroque Flute Players Reflect on Early Music Laura M. Clapper
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COLLEGE OF MUSIC
EXPRESSIONS OF INTEGRITY:
BAROQUE FLUTE PLAYERS REFLECT ON EARLY MUSIC
By
LAURA M. CLAPPER
A Treatise submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Music
2018
Ó 2018 Laura M. Clapper
Laura M. Clapper defended this treatise on May 1, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Eva Amsler Professor Directing Treatise
Richard Clary University Representative
Eric Ohlsson Committee Member
Jeffrey Keesecker Committee Member
Sarah Eyerly Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members and certifies that the treatise has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
To my mentors, family, and friends: I learn from your expressions of integrity every day.
iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Stephen Preston, Jed Wentz, and Sarah Paysnick: Thank you for your time and invaluable insights into the world of early music. Without your willingness to share your experiences, this project would not have been possible.
To my committee members Jeff Keesecker, Eric Ohlsson, and Richard Clary: Thank you for your time and thoughtful comments throughout the many stages of writing this treatise.
To Sarah Eyerly: Thank you for being my musicology mentor, for introducing me to the early music movement, and for your continued support throughout my time at Florida State.
To my family, especially my parents: Thank you for always encouraging me in my creative pursuits. Your unwavering love and support is greatly appreciated.
To all of my teachers and mentors, past and present: Thank you for believing in me as a musician and person, especially when I was unable to believe in myself.
To Eva Amsler: Thank you for teaching me that, “Music is the expression of life’s energy.” You are my model for expressing integrity in your many roles as a flutist, musician, performer, teacher, mentor, and friend.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... vii
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
SECTION ONE: AUTHENTICITY IN EARLY MUSIC ...... 9
1. THE AUTHENTICITY PHENOMENON ...... 10 Sincerity and Authenticity in the Twentieth Century ...... 11 The Moral Language of Authenticity in Early Music Discourse...... 13 Authenticity as Identity in Early Music ...... 15
2. “AUTHENTIC” APPROACHES AND EARLY MUSIC ...... 19 The Authenticity Recipe: Positivism and Early Music ...... 21 The Dimensions of Objectivity and Subjectivity ...... 27 Expressing Integrity: A New Model for Performance and A Way of Being ...... 31
SECTION TWO: INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSIONS OF INTEGRITY ...... 36
3. STEPHEN PRESTON ...... 37 Going Baroque ...... 37 Authenticity and “Being Who You Are” ...... 41 Beyond Traverso: Baroque Dance and Ecosonics ...... 43 The Spirit of an Early Music Pioneer ...... 45
4. JED WENTZ ...... 47 Training Oneself: Education and Models ...... 47 Training Others: Early Music Pedagogy ...... 51 Dodging the Authenticity “Kool-Aid” ...... 52 A Passion for “The Passions” ...... 54 The Future of Early Music ...... 55
5. SARAH PAYSNICK ...... 57 Components of an Early Music Education ...... 57 Period Instruments...... 57 Teachers and Institutions ...... 59 Musical Influences ...... 61 Bringing Early Music to Life ...... 62 The Acquisition of Knowledge ...... 62 Baroque Flute Techniques: Sound and Articulation ...... 63 Repertoire and Musical Discoveries ...... 64 Disengaging from Authenticity ...... 65 The Movement to The Mainstream ...... 66 Playing Early Music in the Twenty-First Century ...... 67
v CONCLUSION: THE INTEGRITY OF EARLY MUSIC ...... 70
APPENDICES ...... 73
A. IRB HUMAN SUBJECTS CONSENT AND DOCUMENTATION ...... 73 IRB Oral History Clearance from Florida State University ...... 73 IRB General Consent Form ...... 74 IRB Consent Form Signatures ...... 76 Sample Interview Questions ...... 77
B. BIOGRAPHIES ...... 78 Stephen Preston...... 78 Jed Wentz ...... 79 Sarah Paysnick ...... 80
Selected Bibliography ...... 81
Biographical Sketch ...... 88
vi ABSTRACT
The purpose of this treatise is to reframe the concept of “being authentic” as “expressing integrity,” both in the context of early music performance and as a way to discuss the personal expression of the self. The culture of the early music movement in the twentieth century provides an interesting case study for understanding how a modern notion of authenticity impacted the beliefs, value system, and identity of early music’s invested groups and individuals. “Expressing integrity” is a new semantic model that better represents the process of musical performance as well as the unique experience of the individual. While authenticity in early music implies an extra-personal and extra-musical set of standards that limits personal expression in the music- making process, “expressing integrity” values each unique interpretation and performance as only one facet of an individual’s personal experience. In this way, “expressing integrity” as a concept is not limited to early music but is also applicable to other areas of performance and creative expression.
This treatise strives to define authenticity, identify its limitations, and re-cite authenticity to the individual as an expression of integrity. More specifically, this project aims to highlight the experiences of Baroque flute players from different generations of the early music movement and to create empathy for the processes of becoming an early music specialist. Three Baroque flute players contributed to this project: Stephen Preston, Jed Wentz, and Sarah Paysnick. Each of these flutists began his/her career at different times, and their early music training took place in three different countries.
The first half of this treatise defines the philosophical concepts of sincerity and authenticity in the context of twentieth-century modernist thought. This also includes unpacking the language and mindset regarding authenticity within the context of the early music movement,
vii discussing the moral implications of the “Authenticity Debate,” and describing the “authentic” performance-practice principles central to the early music revival. Expressing integrity emerges from an understanding of the objective and subjective dimensions in early music performance and aims to re-cite authenticity to the individual.
The second half of this treatise presents the three interviews with the Baroque flutists as discrete chapters. The interviews represent individual expressions of integrity and are reflections of these Baroque flute players’ experiences as early music professionals. Through the interview process, Preston, Wentz, and Paysnick share their insight and wisdom on topics relevant to the practice of early music while contemplating its future trajectory.
viii INTRODUCTION
In the fall semester of 2016, I took a seminar at Florida State University on performance- practice that introduced me to the early music movement of the twentieth century. At the same time, I was learning to play the Baroque flute, and I was also a member of FSU’s Collegium
Musicum ensembles where I regularly performed on Renaissance recorders and crumhorns. I was introduced to the world of early music through these experiences and became acquainted with the important concepts, debates, musicological perspectives, and figures of the early music movement in the twentieth century. I observed that the concept of “authenticity” appeared time and again in discussions of performance-practice. I wanted to know how authenticity worked, why early music proponents were so passionate about defining it, and how perspectives on its moral meaning changed over time. More importantly, I wanted to know whether authenticity as a concept in early music said anything about individual authenticity as a way of being, and whether this term is viable in discussions of early music today.
Authenticity as a concept is fraught with negative connotations. Debunking “authentic performance” was central to arguments within the intellectual and performative realms of the early music movement in the twentieth century. The language used to describe authenticity’s various manifestations has shifted from “historically authentic performance,” to “historically informed performance” (HIP), to even, “historically inspired performance.”1 Despite the slight alterations in phrasing, the negative association with authenticity seems to contaminate any attempt for early music performance to shed this aspect of its identity.
1 See Richard Taruskin, Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); See Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988); See Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty First Century (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 1 Due to its highly contentious nature, the concept of authenticity needs a semantic makeover that more honestly reflects the sentiments of those music-makers who have felt objectified by the musical and moral implications that come with “being authentic.” The purpose of this treatise is to reframe the concept of “being authentic” as “expressing integrity,” both in the context of early music performance and as a personal expression of the self. The definition of authenticity in early music implies an extra-personal and extra-musical set of standards that limits personal expression in the music-making process. In contrast, “expressing integrity” serves as a new semantic model for performance and a way of being that more aptly reflects the subjective processes of performance and the life experiences of individuals. Expressing integrity combines historically-informed performance-practice approaches and personal subjectivity in the musical realization process. The experience of performance then becomes an expression of integrity rather than a fixed result, or object, that can be judged as “authentic” or “inauthentic.”
This shift in thinking validates and values different interpretations, performances, and ideas as only one facet of an individual’s personal experience. In this way, “expressing integrity” as a concept is not limited to early music but is also applicable to other areas of performance and creative expression.
This treatise examines early music as a case study in order to define authenticity, identify its limitations, and re-cite authenticity to the individual as an expression of integrity. More specifically, this project also aims to highlight the experiences of three Baroque flute players from different generations of the early music movement and to create empathy for the processes of becoming an early music specialist. The scope of this treatise is limited to early music and
Baroque flute players for a few reasons. First, this narrower focus provides the opportunity to better synthesize a historical framework for authenticity and to articulate its conceptual
2 reframing to that of “expressing integrity.” Additionally, very little research currently exists that explores the personal experiences of present-day Baroque flutists.
For this project, only three Baroque flute players were interviewed in order to best capture the depth of their individual personal experiences. English flutist Stephen Preston,
American-born and Dutch-trained flutist Jed Wentz, and American flutist Sarah Paysnick are three Baroque flute players whose professional endeavors are as varied as their individual journeys in early music. Each of these flutists began his or her career at a different time, and they were trained in early music in three different countries: Preston in the 1970s in England, Wentz in the 1980s in The Netherlands, and Paysnick in the 2000s in the United States. Their unique perspectives on performance-practice, early music pedagogy, the meaning of authenticity, and the future of early music are both insightful and thought-provoking.
At the mention of “authenticity,” my interviewees’ reactions ranged from thoughtful disappointment to visceral disgust. Although I squirm at the thought of calling a performance
“authentic,” I did not expect to encounter such strong reactions at its very mention. The topic of authenticity in early music appeared to suggest an attack on one’s individual moral character. I felt compelled to better understand the moral underpinnings of authenticity as a concept in modern society and the historiography of authenticity dialogue in early music.
The moral implications of authenticity in early music impressed upon me the need to contextualize the concept of authenticity via philosophical meanderings that are typically far beyond the flutist’s beaten path. I began the journey with Lionel Trilling’s monograph, Sincerity and Authenticity, which has become one of the most frequently-cited texts on authenticity in modern times. Trilling traces the history of sincerity and authenticity and defines them within the context of a post-Enlightenment, modern society. His primary concern is with the moral self in
3 modernity. Trilling’s definitions of sincerity and authenticity serve as the foundation for understanding modern conceptions of authenticity as manifested in the early music movement.
This will be explored and further explained in the first chapter.2
Additionally, there are several other texts that address the political and cultural ramifications of authenticity in modern society. For this project, four sources in particular helped to frame the cultural meaning of authenticity within the context of the early music movement.
David West’s Authenticity and Empowerment: A Theory of Liberation provides a balanced perspective on authenticity as a means for building community in a political context.3 In his anthropological monograph, Culture and Authenticity, Charles Lindholm examines the role of authenticity in modern society to better understand the human need to seek out “real” experiences.4 In The Practices of the Self, philosopher Charles Larmore argues that the authentic self is not a fixed reality but that one’s active engagement with the world and the decisions one makes are what constitute the self.5 Finally, Somogy Varga’s monograph, Authenticity as an
Ethical Ideal, critiques the modern concept of being authentically oneself through the lens of critical social theory.6 These texts provide the basis for defining authenticity in the modern and post-modern world and also speaks to the moral implications of authenticity in early music. A delineation of authenticity through a philosophical lens allows for a sympathetic understanding of the furrowed-brow reactions that its very mention provokes.
2 See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972). 3 See David West, Authenticity and Empowerment: A Theory of Liberation (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). 4 See Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). 5 See Charles Larmore, The Practices of the Self, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 6 See Somogy Varga, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal (New York: Routledge, 2012). 4 After defining and contextualizing authenticity in modern times, I analyze some of the ideas presented in the vast number of writings on the history of the early music movement, authenticity as a practice in early music, and the philosophical ramifications of authenticity in early music. There are several published histories of the early music movement in the twentieth century. Harry Haskell’s The Early Music Revival: A History and Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer’s
Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music are two historical accounts of the early music movement that were written in the 1980s.7 For later accounts of the movement’s history and development, Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell’s The Historical Performance of Music: An
Introduction, Thomas Forrest Kelly’s Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, and Bruce
Haynes’s The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty First
Century frame more contemporary perspectives on what early music performance-practice entails and what it has become in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.8 These histories of the movement frame the meaning of authenticity in early music for different generations of performers and researchers.
The practice of authenticity in early music faced extensive criticism beginning in the late
1970s. These dialogues extend even deeper in musicological circles with oft-cited articles and compilations written and/or edited by Michael Morrow, Laurence Dreyfus, Daniel Leech-
Wilkinson, Nicholas Kenyon, Lewis Lockwood, and Richard Taruskin.9 Each text addresses the
7 See Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History; See also Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). 8 See Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); See Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); See Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty First Century. 9 See Michael Morrow, “Musical Performance and Authenticity” Early Music 6 (1978): 233-46; See Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” Musical Quarterly 69 (Summer, 1983): 297-322; See Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “‘What We Are Doing with Early Music is Genuinely Authentic to Such a Small Degree That the Word Loses Most of Its Intended Meaning,’” Early Music 12, no. 1 (February, 1984): 13–16; See Nicholas Kenyon, ed. Authenticity and Early Music: 5 issue of authenticity in early music including how it is defined versus how it is practiced. These authors question the validity of claiming whether any early music performance qualifies as
“authentic” from unique and differing perspectives. The purpose of this ongoing discussion is to better define and understand the place of early music within the wider classical music scene and to challenge the value-judgment of authenticity as a viable means for evaluating performances.
The philosophical underpinnings of authenticity in early music also manifest in print, including Raymond Leppard’s Authenticity in Music, Peter Kivy’s Authenticities: Philosophical
Reflections on Musical Performance, and Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. These texts explore the various definitions of authenticity and specifically how these definitions have impacted performance-practice and the mindsets within early music. Leppard, Kivy, and Goehr are concerned with the socio-cultural meaning of authenticity in modern times and the consequences of using “authentic” as a label for early music performance-practice.10 Later monographs such as Nick Wilson’s The Art of Re-
Enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age and Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score:
Music as Performance examine the recording industry’s perpetuation of authenticity as a value in early music. Both authors address the enduring and tangible nature of early music recordings as objects, or products, that became the models for “authentic” performance-practice. Wilson and
Cook are concerned with the role of the performer in the music-making process and how to reframe authenticity specifically in performance contexts.11
A Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); See Lewis Lockwood, “Performance and ‘Authenticity’” Early Music 19, no. 4 (1991): 501-508; See Richard Taruskin, Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance. 10 See Raymond Leppard, Authenticity in Music (Boston: Faber, 1988); See Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); See Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 11 See Nick Wilson, The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); See Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013). 6 This treatise is structured in two main sections. The first half outlines a portrait of authenticity in broader societal contexts and within the early music movement. An understanding of authenticity’s origins in early music is necessary in order to better contextualize each of the
Baroque flutists’ personal experiences. This concept of authenticity is two-fold. First, authenticity can be framed philosophically in how we derive a sense of self, and second, authenticity in performance-practice carries moral implications that have pervaded the movement since its beginnings. This section concludes with the proposal of a new model for performance and a way of being: expressing integrity.
In the first chapter, I delve into how authenticity has been discussed both in a broader philosophical context and within the realm of early music by consulting philosophical sources that explore the concepts of sincerity and authenticity. I focus on the language and mindset of
“authenticity” within the context of the movement as well as the moral ideologies that continue to challenge early music and its constituents. The “Authenticity Debate” within the early music movement is one symptom of a larger, more global identity crisis; to understand the implications of authenticity within and outside the context of the movement, there manifests a deeper sense of awareness of the individual within the wider world.
In the second chapter, I describe the practical approaches to “authentic performance- practice” to better understand how authenticity manifested as an ideal in early music. First, I discuss a positivistic approach that defines “ingredients” for an authentic recipe of early music.
Then, I examine the dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity as they relate to the material things (i.e. musical scores and historical instruments) and the people associated with early music.
I propose “expressing integrity” as a new model for discussions of early music performance and perceptions of individual human experience. This will ultimately help to frame the interviewees’
7 expressions of integrity in the chapters that follow. My hope is to generate a deeper understanding of their experiences as both early music performers and individuals.
The second half of this treatise synthesizes the interview discussions with the three
Baroque flute players. I structured the interviews so that there would be room for open-ended conversation about what matters most to each individual in order to illustrate their unique experiences. Each conversation took a different topical path and it is for this reason that the three interviews are formatted individually and presented as discrete chapters. The goal of the interviews was to allow each person to reflect on past experiences, to share insight and wisdom on topics relevant to the practice of early music, and to contemplate the future of early music. I hope that this topic sparks further dialogue about how musicians develop personal preferences and make musical decisions, how performers determine what is meaningful in the study and performance of music, and how this ultimately shapes the individual on a human level.
8
SECTION ONE:
AUTHENTICITY IN EARLY MUSIC
9 CHAPTER 1
THE AUTHENTICITY PHENOMENON
This chapter is divided into three sections and explores the manifestation of authenticity as a phenomenon in twentieth-century philosophy and in the early music movement. The first section explores twentieth-century definitions of authenticity in philosophical circles via the modern conceptions of sincerity and authenticity that stem from Lionel Trilling’s work Sincerity and Authenticity. In order to best understand the moral ramifications of authenticity in early music, it is imperative to define sincerity and authenticity within a larger social and philosophical context. Trilling’s perspective provides the framework from which contemporary notions of authenticity emerge.
The second section dissects the metaphorical and morally-charged language used to frame the concept of authenticity in early music performance. Often, the analogies used to describe authenticity in early music suggest political and religious connotations; this helped define the early music movement’s accepted cultural practices and shape its identity. The moral implications of authenticity in early music become apparent within this discourse.
Finally, the third section of this chapter examines the moral implications of the ideal of authenticity in early music performance as it relates to the formation of both collective and individual identity in the post-World War II era. Authenticity acted as a unifying principle for navigating the modern world and helped set the parameters to codify early music practices. The adoption of the authentic ideal in early music also helped to define the counterculture movement, though not without challenges to its high moral claims.
10 Sincerity and Authenticity in the Twentieth Century
The modern concepts of sincerity and authenticity came into vogue in the twentieth century to describe states of being and awareness in terms of how one relates to oneself and how one relates to others. In 1972, Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity became the seminal text from which to draw twentieth-century definitions of sincerity and authenticity, and his work defines and explores the societal shift from placing value on personal sincerity (trusting a person based on his/her word) to placing value on a person’s level of authenticity or genuineness (how real a person is). Trilling defines sincerity as, “a quality of the personal and private life.”12 This is based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s original “sentiment of being” concept. The “sentiment of being” implies an understanding of an individual’s experience of his existence, and it is through sincerity that we reach our knowledge of others.13 Later analyses and definitions of the term have since shifted to emphasize the social virtue of sincerity that, “aims to avoid being false to others by virtue of being true to oneself.”14
This idea of truthfulness to oneself and to others is where the concept of sincerity deviates from the modern notion of authenticity in its twentieth-century rendering. Definitions of authenticity are similar among several philosopher-scholars who also reflect on this meaning in their own age and time. Trilling describes authenticity as, “autonomy, defining oneself, becoming or being one’s true self,” and philosopher Charles Larmore defines it as, “the endeavor to become one with one’s true self.”15 Furthermore, the idea of a “genuine self” alludes both to the term’s origins in determining the veracity of art and museum objects while also highlighting
12 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 26. 13 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 92. 14 Somogy Varga, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal, 15. 15 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 100; Charles Larmore, The Practices of the Self, 16. 11 the anxiety felt as a member of modern society.16 Authenticity became the counter-movement to
“profound feelings of uncertainty and instability” brought on by modernity. “Modernity” is described by anthropologist Charles Lindholm as, “the condition of living among strangers,” in the post-industrial world. Within these parameters, the value-laden concept of authenticity emerges as a powerful ideal in modern society.17
The ideal of authenticity manifested in the arts as a reframing of cultural values to reflect a new sense of morality.18 That which is deemed “authentic” then seeks general acceptance within the wider cultural movement.19 In modernity, according to Trilling, art was no longer
“required to please” but was, “expected to provide the spiritual substance of life.”20 Described another way, Lindholm states that, “Authenticity…has higher, more spiritual claims to make.”21
In early music, the implication of authenticity was paired with the nineteenth-century concept of the artist as prophet. This association carried through to twentieth-century thought and pervaded the mediums of visual art, dance, and music performance. The moral and cultural burden of being “authentic” then fell not only to material objects, such as musical scores and historical instruments, but also fell to the subjects, or people, who made the art as well.
According to Rousseau, our “sentiment of being” must be judged by the opinion of other people.22 Authenticity as a value-judgment was applied to both objects of consumption and to the
16 See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 93: “As we use [authenticity] in reference to human existence, its provenance is the museum, where persons expert in such matters test whether objects of art are what they appear to be or are claimed to be…worth the admiration they are being given. That the word has become part of the moral slang of our day points to the peculiar nature of our fallen condition, our anxiety over the credibility of existence and of individual existences.” 17 Daniel J. Schulze, Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Make It Real (New York: Bloomsbury Metheun Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 23; Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity, 3; Somogy Varga, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal, 4. 18 Bernard D. Sherman, Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4. 19 Daniel Schulze, Authenticity in Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Make It Real, 40. 20 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 98. 21 Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity, 2. 22 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 93. 12 identities of individual persons, and the language of authenticity became one of moral significance with judgment at its core.23 Within this cultural context, sincerity implies a choice to be true to oneself and others while authenticity implies an innate truth of the self that is then presented and judged in a public sphere. It is with this evaluation of morality that a culture can then “construct a convincing collective framework for belief and action.”24 The culture of the early music movement provides an interesting case study for understanding how a modern notion of authenticity impacted the beliefs, value systems, and identity of both the collective group and the individuals invested in its success.
The Moral Language of Authenticity in Early Music Discourse
To better understand authenticity’s fundamental moral dimensions, it is worth noting the type of language used to portray authenticity in early music discourse. Metaphorical descriptions of authenticity in early music allude to politics and religion in a way that influences both the structure and sentiment of the movement’s own ideological principles. First, the early music movement is associated with the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s and is likened to the fight for civil rights and the expression of antiwar sentiments.25 For example, the egalitarian nature of amateur Renaissance consorts provided musical opportunities that spoke to the breakdown of racial and class divides.26 Additionally, musicologist Laurence Dreyfus’s call to arms in his article, “Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical
Performance in the Twentieth Century,” described the ease with which early music practitioners debated how to play early music rather than why they were motivated to revive earlier musical
23 Somogy Varga, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal, 23. 24 Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity, 144. 25 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 3. 26 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 3 and 46. 13 practices in a twentieth-century context. Dreyfus used language that implied revolutionary action with political implications to describe this phenomenon by using phrases such as “The Language of Resistance,” and “The Revolt of the Advance Guard.”27 This kind of language relates to the way in which early music as a movement could define characteristics of its identity, which both legitimized and made the cause “authentic” to its modern surroundings.
The religious language used to discuss authenticity in early music characterized the internal conflict and moral implications of the movement’s assertions. The following examples illustrate this trend. Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer claim that the movement received a “baptism in fire” for rejecting the new avant-garde styles, and Peter Kivy says that the historically authentic performance movement had its deepest motivation “in a kind of musical puritanism.”28 Some comparisons liken the canonization of musical masterpieces to the collected texts of the Bible, and the musicological approach to theological discourse.29 These ideas are not uncommon in descriptions of the movement’s ideological concepts. Two pillars of the movement’s dogma emphasized being faithful to the composer’s intentions and recreating a work’s original performing conditions.30 There were implications not only for musical texts such as scores but also for the people involved in early music. In performance contexts, the artist was likened to a
“moral prophet, forging new values for all of mankind,” and the scholar was said to possess “an almost evangelical passion” for publishing articles on early music in scholarly journals. 31
27 Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” 308 and 320. 28 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, 4; Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, 283. 29 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, 7 and 15. 30 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, 26. 31 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, 7; Raymond Leppard, Authenticity in Music, 24. 14 The fundamental pillars of authenticity in early music performance-practice were based on morally-driven motives that influenced both the belief system of its proponents and the language with which they described the movement’s ideals. This use of language regarding early music’s authentic undertakings framed the movement’s moral consciousness leading to arguments and disagreements over what authenticity really meant in practice. British harpsichordist and conductor Raymond Leppard suggests that authenticity in practice must compromise in order to be realistic, even at the risk of weakening the possibility of an authentic musical rendering.32 Harry Haskell urges for a sensible approach to historical performance that confesses, “ignorance or agnosticism, rather than unfounded dogmatism.”33 The most subdued reflection is stated by musicologist Gary Tomlinson who settles the issue most poetically. He states, “Our interest in creating authentic sounds of music can be justified only by our belief that they lead us closer to its authentic meanings.”34 In this framework, the ideal of authenticity in early music rests with the belief that even through the performance-practice process, some glimmer of authenticity will emerge.
Authenticity as Identity in Early Music
In his 1996 book, The Early Music Revival: A History, cultural commentator Harry
Haskell describes the early music movement’s history as “the history of the search for authenticity—or, more accurately, the history of changing concepts of authenticity—in the performance of early music.”35 The post-war early music revival coincided with other
32 Raymond Leppard, Authenticity in Music, 75. 33 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 188. 34 Gary Tomlinson, “The Historian, the Performer, and Authentic Meaning in Music,” in Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 115. 35 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 175. 15 counterculture movements in the 1960s and represented a reaction and revolution against the mainstream classical music scene.36 This counterculture effort facilitated the formation of a new identity for those breaking away from the classical music mainstream, but the movement’s initial sense of freedom lent itself to the creation of rules and regulations to which its proponents might conform in search of musical truth. The moral standard set by a modern notion of authenticity was socially ubiquitous and helped to shape these characteristics of the early music movement’s identity. Debates about what made a performance or recording “authentic” became part of the ongoing dialogue to legitimize the study, practice, and performance of early music. This next section acknowledges the “Authenticity Debate” among scholars and practitioners of early music, and the subsequent chapter addresses the resulting conventions of “authentic” early music performance-practice.
The “Authenticity Debate” within early music was described by one scholar, Robert P.
Morgan, as “a reflection of a cultural identity crisis,” characterized by “modernity as a whole.”37
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a revolt against claims of authentic performance was already underway due to the many competing manifestations of authenticity in performance-practice.
Widely-disseminated essays by musicologists Michael Morrow, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson,
Richard Taruskin, and Laurence Dreyfus tackled the issues brought on by claims of “being authentic.”38 This led to a series of very reflective histories, symposia, articles, debates, and discussions about the state of early music in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which claims of
36 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 3. 37 Robert P. Morgan, “Tradition, Anxiety, and the Current Musical Scene,” in Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78. 38 See Michael Morrow, “Musical Performance and Authenticity,” 233-46; See Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, “‘What We Are Doing with Early Music is Genuinely Authentic to Such a Small Degree That the Word Loses Most of Its Intended Meaning,’” 13–16; See Richard Taruskin, Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance; See Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” 297-322. 16 authenticity are directly addressed as the main sources of contention. Some of these compilations and reflections include Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer’s book, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music (1985), Raymond Leppard’s Authenticity in Music (1988), Nicholas Kenyon’s edited volume titled Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (1988), and Harry Haskell’s book, The Early Music Revival (1988). This is by no means a comprehensive list of writings on authenticity and early music performance from this decade. However, the sudden burst of publications on the topic is notable and suggests both an individual and collective need to reclaim a lost identity that, perhaps, seemed clearer during the movement’s formative years.
The authenticity dialogue did not dissipate in the 1990s and 2000s. Many more scholars took up the mantle of synthesizing various theses on “authentic” approaches and questioning whether or not authenticity was compatible within the practice of early music. There is a clear attempt to reconcile contentious definitions of authenticity and to reshape the place of early music within a scholarly-performance context. Early music practitioners redefined the place of authenticity in a performance context and as a moral, human issue, and the movement’s identity began to reflect the subjective experience of individuals. For example, in Peter Kivy’s philosophical reflection on authentic performance-practice, he addresses the role of personal authenticity and its compatibility with early music.39
In later publications at the turn of the twenty-first century, Bernard Sherman interviewed several prominent early music performers to glean insight from their experiences and expertise; he upholds that the best historical performers share their art insightfully through original music- making.40 As recently as 2014, Nick Wilson describes early music performance as “the art of re- enchantment,” in which authenticity should be seen, “as the human capacity to reconcile the
39 Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, 108. 40 Bernard Sherman, Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers, 21. 17 apparently irreconcilable on an ongoing everyday basis.”41 This shift in tone reflects what
Nicholas Cook calls “a brilliant exercise in image management,” in which the people who comprise the early music community continually reflect and redefine their identity through an understanding of applied authenticity. 42
The ideal of authenticity, as unattainable or unrealistic as it may be, presented an opportunity to redefine, transform, and assert an identity for early music movement protagonists.
According to political scientist and social psychologist David West, “Alternative cultures flourish when they both emancipate and empower their followers.”43 In the case of early music, authenticity originally provided freedom from the institutional restrictions of mainstream classical music, while empowering its members to discover and redesign a musical past that brought a sense of purpose and meaning to them individually and collectively. The purpose and meaning of authenticity in early music reflects a growth process that is almost as elusive as trying to articulate the philosophical definition of authenticity as it relates to the development of the self.
41 Nick Wilson, The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age, 211. 42 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, 28. 43 David West, Authenticity and Empowerment: A Theory of Liberation, 71. 18 CHAPTER 2
“AUTHENTIC” APPROACHES AND EARLY MUSIC
The parameters for determining authenticity in early music performance represent what
Lionel Trilling describes as a culture’s concerted effort to achieve authenticity based on its own conventions.44 Naturally, the conventions of early music “authenticity” had to differ from what was expected of classical musicians at the time. These expectations became the values that served as the morality measuring stick for determining whether or not you could identify as an
“authentic” early music practitioner and whether or not performances and recordings could be labeled “authentic.”
This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section parses out authenticity’s tangible aspects as they manifest in the approach to performing early music. This practical guide includes the most widely-accepted and fundamental principles of “historically authentic performance” that encompass both extra-musical and extra-personal standards for approaching the practice of early music. These principles for performance authenticity also align with historical musicology’s empirical-positivist method, in which music is objectified as a text.45 In a performance context, truth and logical certainty imply a judgment-value system of right and wrong based on observable fact; in short, both performances and performers can be labeled as either “good” or “bad” depending on how closely they follow particular guidelines for authenticity. Based on the current understanding of all that authenticity entails, these musical and moral guidelines function only within the parameters of a positivistic and object-driven purview.
44 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 105. 45 Glenn Stanley, “Musicology: Disciplines of Musicology: Historical Musicology,” Grove Music Online (15 Mar. 2018), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 19 The sustainability and validity of this model becomes central to the authenticity debates of the
1980s, coinciding with pronounced shifts in disciplinary approaches to musical analysis that begin to consider both cultural context and subjectivity as viable lenses for musicological inquiry.46
The second section of this chapter examines the objectivist outlook of “authentic performance-practice.” Historically, the emphasis on objective renderings of early music negated the idea that performances are experiences that unfold in real time and that the music-making process is as an action-based phenomenon. To apply authenticity principles to early music imposes a two-dimensional objectification on the subjective elements of performance that are central to the concept of music as action. The static nature implied by the objectification process combined with the moral value-judgment of authenticity limit the meaning and expression of musical experiences (performances) and the subjective and unquantifiable nature of individuals
(performers). In this context, authenticity is a misnomer that cannot holistically assess performance processes and performers qualitatively.
When considering the moral weight and semantic limitations of the term “authenticity,” it begs the question of whether a more poignant phrase could better capture its virtuous intentions.
A new semantic model must consider the subjective position of every individual while embracing the concept that performances are also not objects; in this framework, the term
“authenticity” loses potency as a descriptor for what early music practitioners hope to convey in their creative endeavors. In the third section of this chapter, the more dynamic concept of expressing integrity replaces authenticity in order to re-cite early music experiences to the
46 See Glenn Stanley, “Musicology: Disciplines of Musicology: Historical Musicology:” “‘New Musicology’ attempts to grasp the totality of a moment in historical time rather than presenting the dynamic of historical process.” 20 individual. In the context of early music, to express integrity means to engage critically with musical sources, conduct in-depth research, prepare music at a high level for performance, incorporate personal sincerity into the interpretative process, and create live performances that connect with an audience. To speak about performances and performers as integrous will transcend authenticity’s static nature and has the potential to reinvigorate discussions of musical processes and philosophies on ways of being.
The Authenticity Recipe: Positivism and Early Music
In the realm of early music, a performer could play “authentically” through the careful application of specific performance-practice techniques. These techniques developed partially out of information gathered in primary sources, and they reflect a reverence for past practices that could provide the most truthful, or authentic, realization of a musical work. Early music seemed to resurrect itself through the lens of objectivity, which was unaided by personal interpretation. This section defines the authentic approach to early music through an understanding of the empirical-positivist approach in musicology and then explains the principle ingredients for deriving “authentic” performances.
The empirical-positivist approach in musicology places an emphasis on “locating and studying documents and establishing objective (or would-be objective) facts about and from them.”47 Positivistic approaches to the authentic rendering of early music became the norm in musicological circles post-World War II in order to distance the discipline of musicology from politically sensitive topics that might align with fascist or communist principles.48 In turning
47 See Glenn Stanley, “Musicology: Disciplines of Musicology: Historical Musicology.” 48 Pamela M. Potter, “Musicology: National Traditions of Musicology: Germany and Austria,” Grove Music Online (15 Mar. 2018), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 21 their backs on, “virtuosity and exhibitionism,” early music practitioners tried to “banish all traces of Romantic expression from their performances, elevating reticence to the level of an aesthetic principle.”49 This reaction to Romantic expression in music performance and interpretation reflected the post-war mentality and a shift to modernity.
By the 1960s in America, university students began to question the validity of a positivistic approach that emphasized objectivity in musical research.50 However, it was not until the 1980s that a consideration for the sociocultural context of music and musical practices became an important aspect of musicological inquiry. This shift in thought, called “new musicology,” and its influence was widespread. New musicology “arose out of the perception that musicology as a discipline had become too strongly based on sources, documentation, and newly discovered facts; that it lacked broader consideration of critical, aesthetic, psychological, perceptual, and sociological issues.”51 As a result, dialogue regarding the authenticity debate and
“authentic” versus “historically-informed performance-practice” began in the 1980s, discussions of which appeared in the previous chapter.
Regardless of how early music proponents view authenticity now, it is important to understand the foundational principles that shaped the movement’s resurgence in the latter half of the twentieth century. During the early music revival, the positivistic approach applied to performance-practice becomes a recipe for authenticity. The ingredients can be summarized as four principle factors: fidelity to the work (Werktreue and the publication and use of urtext editions), fidelity to the composer’s intentions, fidelity to the original performance circumstances
(playing music the way it sounded in its own time), and the use of period instruments and period-
49 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 178. 50 See Pamela M. Potter, “Musicology: National Traditions of Musicology: Germany and Austria.” 51 David Fallows, “New Musicology,” The Oxford Companion to Music (15 Mar. 2018), http://www.oxfordreference.com. 22 appropriate tuning systems.52 An additional ingredient is personal authenticity, which Peter Kivy proposes as necessary but incompatible with the four factors mentioned above; it is also worth noting that Kivy’s philosophical text, Authenticities, was not published until 1995, when much of the discourse regarding positivistic approaches to early music was no longer the norm.53 The widely-held preference for a long time was that performers “adhere to some external set of performance requirements” rather than “participate personally in the performance.”54 Today, a statement like this would spark controversy. However, at the beginning of the early music movement, the four ingredients necessary for “authentic reinterpretation” was how the “purist vanguard” of the early music movement defined its goals.55
The first principle of authenticity in early music was centered around the German concept of Werktreue, or work-fidelity, which denotes “adherence to accurate and reliable musical texts.”56 Werktreue arose from the idea that a musical text represents and contains the entirety of a performance.57 In Lydia Goehr’s philosophical essay titled, The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works, she traces the concepts of Werktreue and the composer-as-genius to the idealization of
Beethoven in the nineteenth century.58 She asserts that we treat works “as original, unique products of a special, creative activity. We assume, further, that the tonal, rhythmic, and instrumental properties of works are constitutive of structurally integrated wholes that are
52 Raymond Leppard, Authenticity in Music, 35. See also, Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 280. See also, Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction, 10: “The widespread aversion to ‘interpretation’ has been widely linked with Stravinskian neo-classicism, as performers shied away, not just from virtuosity and exhibitionism, but from interventionism of any kind.” 53 Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, 108. 54 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 87. 55 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, 91. 56 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 176. 57 Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century, 90. 58 See Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. 23 symbolically represented by composers in scores.”59 The treatment of works as objects that are part of an imaginary museum plays out in the publication of critical and urtext editions that would provide a version closest to the original.60
Fidelity to the composer’s intentions was another principle with which to achieve authenticity in early music performance. In the early twentieth century, Arnold Dolmetsch was one of the first performers to propose that early music be played with the composer’s intentions in mind.61 Similarly, Wanda Landowska’s famous phrase about playing Bach in her way sparked the idea that one could, through “spiritual transmigration,” enter the mind of a composer from another era.62 To derive the composer’s intentions, score study is of the utmost importance, but due to the sparse inclusion of dynamics or articulation markings in earlier repertoire, performers are obligated to interpret performance-practice elements that are not notated in the score. The idea of interpretation became problematic because it implies that the performer is the mediator between the score and the composer’s intentions. To achieve “authenticity,” the performer had to temper any personal subjectivity that comes with interpretation, and to be “authentic,” the performances needed to truly capture the composer’s intentions. This allowed the music to
“speak for itself” through realizations unencumbered by a performer’s interventionism and subjectivity.63
The next ingredient for establishing authenticity in early music was to understand the context and conditions in which works were originally performed in order to recreate how the music sounded to its first listeners. In this model, sound is reduced to an objective, physical fact,
59 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 2. 60 Raymond Leppard, Authenticity in Music, 35. 61 Howard Mayer Brown, “Pedantry or Liberation? A Sketch of the Historical Performance Movement,” in Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, ed. Nicholas Kenyon, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 39. 62 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 175. 63 Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction, 10; Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 70. 24 something that can be studied, understood, and recreated authentically.64 In conductor Nikolaus
Harnoncourt and Reinhard G. Pauly’s 1995 book Baroque Music Today, Harnoncourt stated that this process of reconstruction and contextualization was an attitude towards historical music that preferred to “return oneself to the past” rather than bring old music into the present. Harnoncourt speculated that this was a modern symptom of “the loss of a truly living contemporary music.”65
In other words, the recreation of early music encouraged feelings of nostalgia for times past and was a reaction against the avant-garde styles in the latter half of the twentieth century. The research aspect of performance-practice also helped to bridge the gap between past and present musical styles through recreation that reflected the correct, or “authentic,” context for performance.66
Finally, to be truly “authentic,” performing on period instruments and in various temperaments and pitch centers provided the physical tools for recreating the three aforementioned ingredients. The use of authentic instruments as performance objects could drastically influence the music’s very essence.67 To perform on an early instrument meant that the score’s authentic meaning might be transmitted through sound, the composer’s intentions could be more readily expressed, and the historically accurate conditions of performance could be more easily reconstructed. The Horniman Museum in London, the Galpin Society in England, and the American Musical Instrument Society are three active groups who publish journals, hold meetings, and connect collectors, dealers, and aficionados from all over the world.68 At the
64 Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, 47. 65 Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Reinhard G. Pauly, Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech: Ways to a New Understanding of Music (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1995), 14-15. 66 Richard Taruskin, Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance, 18. 67 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 61. 68 The Horniman Museum is a free museum and gardens area located in South London’s Forest Hill. Originally opened by Frederick John Horniman during Victorian times, the exhibits include anthropological collections, musical instruments, an aquarium, a Butterfly House, and a natural history collection. See “The Horniman: About,” The Horniman Public Museum and Public Park Trust, accessed April 3, 2018, 25 beginning of the early music movement, the idea of an “age of common exploration” summarizes the autodidactic approach to learning how to play old instruments that presented new challenges for professional and amateur musicians alike.69 Instruments became the most tangible and authentic objects of early music; the real experience of producing sound and acquainting the repertoire with the proper instruments was an important pillar of early music performance.
In the 1960s and 1970s, early music pioneers valued the information gleaned from the study of historical instruments, surviving scores, and treatises for research on playing techniques and stylistic conventions. The goal of this kind of research was to adhere to the composer’s intentions and the musical work while also considering the original performing conditions. The subsequent “objects” of early music performance were recordings, which often claimed to be definitive, historically-authentic renderings of major works. A musical recording diminishes a performance experience to a static and preserved object; in the early music recording industry, renditions of famous works became the standard by which to measure all other performances of particular works to the extent that different interpretations were easily judged as good or bad, authentic or inauthentic. All of these artifacts helped to create the parameters for authentic performance.70 These objects, fixed in their existence, contrasted with the subjects of early
https://www.horniman.ac.uk/about; The Galpin Society was founded in 1946 to commemorate a priest by the name of Francis W. Galpin (1858-1945) who had a lifelong interest in studying, collecting, and making instruments. The society promotes the study of all kinds of musical instruments. See “History of The Galpin Society,” The Galpin Society, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.galpinsociety.org/history.htm; “The American Musical Instrument Society is an international organization founded in 1971 to promote better understanding of all aspects of the history, design, construction, restoration, and usage of musical instruments in all cultures and from all periods.” See “The American Musical Instrument Society: Welcome,” The American Musical Instrument Society, accessed April 9, 2018, https://www.amis.org/; Kelly, 109-111. 69 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 114. 70 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 6. 26 music—the performers and performances—and set the standard for what was acceptable or
“authentic.”
The Dimensions of Objectivity and Subjectivity
There was a clear delineation in “authentic performance-practice” that separated the fixed objects and the impermanent subjects involved in the music-making process. However, by upholding these objects as fundamental to authentic performance, early music tried to disassociate from the unavoidable elements of subjectivity and their role in musical recreation.
The most prominent elements of subjectivity are personal interpretation and performer individuality. This next section explores these dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity within the early music movement.
The music-making process was objectified by attempts to produce authentic performances of well-known and newly re-discovered works. The recording industry had an enormous influence on the classification of performances as objects. In his seminal essay collection, Text & Act, Richard Taruskin cites recording technology and radio broadcasts of early music performances as “serving the idealization of the objectified work and seeking…to keep the threateningly contingent subjectivity of the performer at bay.”71 Performance became a static, musical object—a material product—through the recording process. In the late 1980s, typical musicological thought from this time considered a performance “an inevitably imperfect approximation of a fixed, though knowable, ideal embodied in the score.”72 American conductor and musicologist Will Crutchfield quickly counters the lack of inherent logic in this approach
71 Richard Taruskin, Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance, 23. 72 Will Crutchfield, “Fashion, Conviction, and Performance Style in an Age of Revivals,” in Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 24. 27 saying, “It is just as reasonable to conceive of the text as an inevitably imperfect approximation of an unfixed ideal, knowable only and instantly in the moment of realization, embodied in the act of music itself—in each individual performance.”73 Similarly, British musicologist Peter Le
Huray believed that “a musical object can be viewed from many different angles and yet remain essentially the same piece.”74 Despite the open-mindedness of these statements, the perpetuation of music performance as object persisted through the production of recordings.
Twenty-first century scholars such as Nicholas Cook and Nick Wilson have heavily researched the impact of recordings and the recording industry on the popularization and canonization of “authentic” performances. “Authentic” recordings became the models for early music and non-period instrument groups alike.75 From an objectivity standpoint, the process of performance favors scientifically observed data in recreation.76 If a recording of a performance is thought of as a material product, Cook claims that it is necessary to “think differently about what sort of an object music is, and indeed how far it is appropriate to think of it as an object at all.”77
In this way, the material nature of recordings implied an objectification of musical performance as well. Additionally, Wilson describes the process of performing and breathing life into early music with the term “re-enchantment” which contradicts the mindset that discrete performances are fixed objects.78
Through the objectification of aspects of performance-practice, the “products” of early music could, in some tangible way, be labeled “authentic.” Nevertheless, this definition of
73 Will Crutchfield, “Fashion, Conviction, and Performance Style in an Age of Revivals,” 24. 74 Peter Le Huray, Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 4. 75 See Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. See also, Nick Wilson, The Art of Re- enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age. 76 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, 93. 77 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, 1. 78 Nick Wilson, The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age, 40-42. 28 authenticity as an empirical and objective rendering imposes a two-dimensional, static mentality on Wilson’s concept of the “re-enchantment” of early music. The fluid dynamism and ever- present subjectivity involved in music-making must also be considered. In a similar fashion,
Kivy concludes that objectivist historical authenticity and subjective personal authenticity are incompatible and cannot be concurrently pursued.79 The dimensions of subjectivity are explored in relation to authenticity in early music.
Subjectivity implies something unfixed and fluid, comprising mass and contour capable of changing from one moment to the next. Music as a noun can be transformed into “musicking” as a verb to describe the temporality of live performance.80 The two most crucial subjects of any music-making endeavor involve the active process of “musicking” in performance and the performers themselves, both of which exist in impermanence. The objectification of performances and performers is more typical in an authenticity-driven model because that which is unchanging is real and substantive compared with an entity that is given a subjective status. By conceptualizing performances as unique iterations that are unrepeatable, the subjectivity of the human being is also revealed. In Cook’s discussion of the role of recordings in the early music industry, he distinguishes between “musicking as a human process,” and “music as an enduring product,” and concludes that the all-encompassing interactions of professional musicians, amateurs, and listeners “combines the pleasures of social interaction, embodied practice, sensory gratification, and private fantasy.”81
79 Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, 138. 80 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, 225 and 413. Cook uses Christopher Small’s term “musicking” to explain that the process of making music is active. Cook defines musicking as, “a pure, temporal process that leaves no residue.” Cook contrasts the verb musicking with music as a noun that suggests a substantive form such as a “textual product” or inanimate object. See also Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 81 Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, 413. 29 In Sensing Sound: Music as Vibrational Practice, musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim conceptualizes music as a vibrational practice in which performers and listeners share a total sensory experience in the process of live music-making.82 Music as vibrational practice relates closely to the concept that a performance is process-related more than it is product-related. She asserts that music is action-oriented, meaning that the musical process is more crucial to the performance experience than the end result.83 Eidsheim also describes humans as non-static beings, which suggests the subjective nature of what it means to be human. The interaction of performer and performance as process transforms the totality of the performance experience into the subjective realm.84 The total experience of a performance can be described as a “thick event” which encompasses a multidimensional understanding of the experience on sensory, spatial, and temporal levels.85 Eidsheim concludes that musical experiences are unique and unrepeatable,
“…with a potential to affect us that can be revealed only in the particular articulation that takes place within and among each material situation and unique listener.”86 This reinforces the concept of musical performances as experiential and subjective.
The discussions of early music that question the validity of authenticity in performance- practice reflect the myriad articulations and subjectivities to which Eidsheim refers. In Early
82 See Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. See also, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 155: “…music is the practice of vibration. Tied to this realization is the understanding that music is neither external nor measurable.…since music is vibration, there are multitudes of material circumstances that contribute to each of its particular articulations, each unrepeatable and hence unique, and each with a potential to affect us that can be revealed only in the particular articulation that takes place within and among each material situation and unique listener.” 83 Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice, 111: “…music ought to be defined as corporeal action rather than as sonic product…” Eidsheim reframes music as a vibrational practice rather than as only defined by sound and sound quality. Additionally, she compares Jackson Pollock’s action painting to the way in which the whole of musical performance is experiential and its importance and meaning are in the process from moment to moment, not in the final product. 84 Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice, 181. 85 Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice, 181. 86 Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing & Listening as Vibrational Practice, 155. 30 Music: A Very Short Introduction, Thomas Forrest Kelly asserts that, “Every moment is different, and the fact that no performance is the same as any other makes it clear that there cannot be an authentic performance in the sense of a definitive or normative performance.”87
Similarly, musical philosopher Stan Godlovitch suggests that a conception of authenticity should reflect the three-dimensional process of performance:
But once we abandon thin conceptions of musical experience or musical value, we must abandon any thinness in authenticity. Far from supervening upon any such sparse notions of experience or value, the notion is, like generosity and integrity, bound up in the dynamic of an ongoing and largely experimental and exploratory practice to find out more about what we are and once were like.88
The subjective nature of performance means that an infinite number of interpretations are possible, even by the same artists.89 Interpretation in both early music and musical performance more generally can then be conceptualized as follows: it is the process by which performers interact with objective materials and infuse individual subjectivity into a performance experience. The interpretative process culminates in performance, in which individuals express integrity through re-enchantment and creativity.
Expressing Integrity: A New Model for Performance and A Way of Being
As previously discussed, early music’s “authenticity” limits and objectifies both performers and performances. The expression of integrity is one way to reframe the ideal of authenticity in early music, re-citing it to the individual. Although the semantic model of
“expressing integrity” is a new idea, the concept is not. The following examples illustrate the
87 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 90. 88 Stan Godlovitch, “Performance Authenticity: Possible, Practical, Virtuous,” in Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 172. 89 See Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction, 89: “What is authentic and historical to us may be laughable to someone else. The subjective is all around us.” See also, Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity, 27: “…it is not uncommon for different performers, each equally aiming at historical authenticity, to produce quite different versions of the same piece.” 31 language used to describe the subjective nature of performances and performers. First, Haynes discusses the importance of pursuing authenticity rather than worrying about the resulting outcomes.90 Howard Mayer Brown describes “authentic” performances as being, “expertly played and sung, genuinely committed, and artistically convincing.”91 In the pursuit of authenticity, Leppard emphasizes the importance of a, “seriousness of purpose combined with the acquisition of knowledge,” and, “a never-ending revision of the probabilities and possibilities.”92 Similarly, Gary Tomlinson alludes to the performer’s role in the process of constructing an interpretation, which, “frees us from the presupposition that a single, true meaning is waiting out there to be found.”93 Taruskin also asserts that, “as long as we know what we do want and what we do not want, and act upon that knowledge, we have values and are not dirt. We have authenticity.”94 These definitions of authenticity illustrate how the use of the term has been justified in the past.
The term authenticity is so contentious in early music circles, however, that many express the need for a new descriptor or a shift in mindset regarding its implications and meaning. For example, Lydia Goehr states that, “retaining the terminology of authenticity remains problematic while its use continues—as I believe it still does—to carry absolutist and unduly rigid, objectivist sentiments.”95 Harry Haskell also describes authenticity as, “one of those noxious buzzwords that one would willingly dispense with if a satisfactory alternative could be found.”96 The desire for a
90 Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century, 227: “It is not the realization of Authenticity that is important to us as musicians; it is rather the pursuit of it.” 91 Howard Mayer Brown, “Pedantry or Liberation? A Sketch of the Historical Performance Movement,” 56. 92 Raymond Leppard, Authenticity in Music, 78. 93 Gary Tomlinson, “The Historian, the Performer, and Authentic Meaning in Music,” 117. 94 Richard Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” in Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 207. 95 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 283. 96 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 176. 32 shift in language has led to terms like, “historically-informed performance,” sometimes referred to as HIP, or, “historically aware” performance. “Performance-practice” and “historically- informed” are still unsatisfactory terms for some, having been described as both “cumbersome” and “ugly but convenient.”97 As Kivy puts it, “Not surprisingly, we are again confronted with the stubborn truth that there is no single road to sensible authenticity and that sensible authenticity may not be the road to deep musical understanding and appreciation.”98 There is a consensus that the manner of approach to early music is much more important than recreating the past itself.99
The adoption of a new semantic model would more aptly describe how people approach early music, and it would alleviate the objectivist, judgment-value laden implications of authenticity that are imposed on subjective musical entities. In discussing interpretation, Joel
Lester expresses that in performance,
…choices must be made among alternative approaches to any given issue…But in contrast to the way in which analytical decisions are often regarded, performance decisions suggest that many…possible choices are not so much ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ as simply different, leading to varying perspectives.100
Expressing integrity in performance comes with an understanding that performance approaches and outcomes will be as unique and varied as the individuals who shape them. Authenticity, by contrast, forces performances and performers to conform to an aesthetic ideal that does not account for personal subjectivity in interpretation.
The authenticity debate has sparked suggestions that subjective entities such as performers and the performance process should be accounted for in the context of early music.
97 Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, 176; Peter Le Huray, Authenticity in Performance: Eighteenth-Century Case Studies, xvi. 98 Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, 232. 99 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, xii. 100 Joel Lester, “Performance and Analysis: Interaction and Interpretation,” in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 211. 33 Laurence Dreyfus states that, “Early Music signifies first of all people and only secondarily things.”101 In a similar way, Howard Mayer Brown implies integrity in performance by stating that, “Personal commitment is a necessary virtue for performers.”102 Authenticity in early music became a conceptual trope out of a need to reclaim a collective identity and a sense of self. As
Cohen and Spitzer eloquently state, “We need the opportunity this music affords us to come face to face with remote yet vitally important parts of our own selves.”103 The pursuit of early music is not equivalent with the pursuit of perfection or authenticity. Instead, the pursuit of early music comprises the meeting of unfixed entities transformed through subjective renderings that afford unique experiences.
So, what does it mean to express integrity? In the context of early music performance, a concerted effort must be made to absorb and learn as much as possible about the music, the composer, the instrument, the cultural context, and the performance considerations; in short, elements of historically-informed performance-practice are incredibly important for a holistic approach to early music. In addition, it is equally important to acknowledge the truth of one’s own subjectivity in the learning and performing process. The infusion of personal subjectivity into the realization of these performance-practice elements is what brings the music to life. Each moment of performance allows individuals to express their own integrity while simultaneously expressing the integrity of the music. Expressing integrity re-cites authenticity to the individual.
The experience of performance becomes an expression of integrity rather than a fixed result that can be judged as “authentic” or “inauthentic.”
101 Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” 298. 102 Howard Mayer Brown, “Pedantry or Liberation? A Sketch of the Historical Performance Movement,” 55. 103 Joel Cohen and Herb Snitzer, Reprise: The Extraordinary Revival of Early Music, 101. 34 The interview discussions with Baroque flute players presented in the subsequent chapters demonstrate three individual expressions of integrity. Each of these Baroque flute players embody the concept of expressing integrity specifically in early music performance.
Through a rigorous commitment to early music performance and the processes of becoming historically-informed, they exemplify this new model for making music and a way of being. It must be made clear that these are only three isolated case studies and that the expression of integrity also manifests in other performance contexts outside of early music. Expressing integrity aims to capture the holistic experience of live music and the essence of what it means to be one’s own person within a fabric of humanity.
35
SECTION TWO:
INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSIONS OF INTEGRITY
36 CHAPTER 3
STEPHEN PRESTON
My first encounter with flutist Stephen Preston was at a memorable performance he gave at the 2006 National Flute Association Convention in Pittsburgh, PA. He was honored with the
NFA Lifetime Achievement Award that year, and I was a rising high school senior who was captivated by the entire experience of being surrounded by flutists of all ages, abilities, and levels of fame for the four-day convention. Eleven years later on a sunny day in August 2017, I met with Preston at the Roberts Burns Birthplace Museum coffee shop in Ayr, Scotland. Here, we sat for several hours to discuss Preston's life experiences and his thoughts on early music.
Going Baroque
In discussing his flute beginnings, Stephen Preston (b. 1945) recalled purchasing a fife at a flea market and his subsequent involvement in his school’s military band at age thirteen. The band then swapped his fife for an old, wooden Louis Lot flute.104 Preston reminisces, “It was like a tree trunk, and it had a very short foot joint which used to fall off occasionally.”105 His initial career interests would have taken him into medical school to become a doctor, but he relished playing the flute. His decision to study music led him to the Guildhall School of Music in
London where he was a student of the renowned English flutist Geoffrey Gilbert.106 While a
104 Louis Lot (1807-1896) was the official flute maker and supplier to the Paris Conservatoire when Louis Dorus became professor in 1860 and standardized the use of the silver Boehm-system flute in his studio. See “Louis Lot (1807-96),” FluteHistory.com, accessed April 21, 2018, http://www.flutehistory.com/Instrument/Makers/Louis_Lot/index.php3. 105 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 106 Geoffrey Gilbert (1914-1989) was called by the London Times, “the most influential British flutist of the twentieth century.” He was principal flutist of several top British orchestras, and he taught at Trinity College, The Guildhall School, Royal Manchester College of Music, and Stetson University in DeLand, FL. See “Geoffrey Gilbert (1914-1989),” Larry Krantz, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.larrykrantz.com/ggdoc.htm. 37 student at the Guildhall School, he began playing in a trio with cellist Anthony Pleeth and harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock, both of whom were his classmates at the time.107 The trio garnered a lot of success for the young musicians as they toured the area and recorded for the
BBC.
At the time, Preston was not yet acquainted with playing the Baroque flute, his main reason being that the recordings and performances he heard were not to his liking. Despite his initial hesitation to take up the instrument, he was later inspired to do so after several influential encounters. First, he credits Dutch flutist Frans Vester with reshaping his opinion of the instrument.108 Preston saw Vester in recital in London where he performed on both modern and
Baroque flutes. Preston said, “I actually thought he [Vester] was better [on Baroque flute] than people who were better-known for it.”109
Preston was also heavily influenced by his initial encounters with historical flutes, which were made possible by two individuals. While Preston’s flute, cello, and harpsichord trio were on tour, a Vice-Consul in Suez by the name of Arthur Watts hosted the group.110 Watts procured a four-keyed, eighteenth-century flute, which Preston tried. He remarked that his impression was a positive one, even though everything he had previously read about nineteenth-century, one- keyed, historical wooden flutes described them as, “fit for nothing but firewood.”111
107 Anthony Pleeth (b. 1948) is a cellist who has played Baroque cello with the English Concert and the Academy of Ancient Music. Preston and Pleeth formed the Galliard Harpsichord Trio together with Trevor Pinnock in 1981. See “Anthony Pleeth,” Zoffany Ensemble, accessed April 3, 2018, https://www.zoffanyensemble.com/anthony-pleeth. See also, “Stephen Preston: Biography,” Stephen Preston, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.stephenpreston-ecosonics.com/bio.html; Trevor Pinnock is an English harpsichordist and conductor. He founded The English Concert in 1972, and the European Brandenburg Ensemble in 2006. He was a founding member of the Galliard Harpsichord Trio with Preston and Pleeth in the 1980s. See “Trevor Pinnock,” Trevor Pinnock, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.trevorpinnock.com/. 108 Frans Vester (1922-1987) was a teacher, editor, and scholar of early music. He recorded with Frans Brüggen and Gustav Leonhardt and edited hundreds of early music repertoire for flute. See “Frans Vester (1922- 87),” FluteHistory.com, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.flutehistory.com/Players/Frans%20Vester/index.php3. 109 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 110 Stephen Preston, e-mail message to author, May 22, 2018. 111 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 38 Additionally, Preston grew to know Philip Bate, a founding member of the Galpin Society and an amateur musician and recorder player. Bate also lent Preston a historical flute from his extensive collection of historical instruments, which he later donated to the Holywell Museum in
Cambridge.112 Both of these experiences sparked Preston’s interest in playing earlier instruments.
Finally, Preston also spent time at the Horniman Museum in London. Of this experience, he says:
I, at the time, lived in south London, and there was a museum about a couple of miles away, and it had a big collection of old instruments. It’s the Horniman Museum – the collection is quite famous. And it had a load of wind instruments, a load of flutes, collected by a man by the name of Adam Carse.113 So, I got friendly with the curator at the Horniman Museum, and I started going over there to look at the flutes, to practice the flutes there and to learn how to play them, which had a lot of repercussions…because in the end, I decided I liked it so much that I thought maybe I’d give up playing Boehm flute.114
The influence of an individual performer, a few chance encounters with historical flutes, and the experience of playing on a variety of curated instruments contributed to Preston’s decision to permanently switch to the Baroque flute. By the early 1970s, Preston set aside the Boehm-system flute after he examined and played quite a bit of contemporary flute repertoire. In his words,
I got all the Boehm flute solo repertoire I could afford to gather, the new repertoire, to decide whether I wanted to carry on playing the instrument or not. I decided it wasn’t good enough. My experience then of the flute music was pretty awful. It was either sort of atonal or pseudo-Baroque.115
Preston’s career shift from that of a modern to a Baroque flute player began in his mid- collegiate years while he attended the Guildhall School. Despite the success garnered by his
112 Stephen Preston, e-mail message to author, May 22, 2018. 113 Adam Carse (1878-1958) was an English composer. The Adam Carse collection at the Horniman Museum contains his personal library, research papers, manuscript notes, copies of lectures, correspondence, makers catalogues, sales lists, and concert programs. See “Archives: Musical Instruments,” The Horniman Public Museum and Public Park Trust, accessed April 9, 2018, https://www.horniman.ac.uk/collections/archives/. 114 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 115 Ibid. 39 flute, cello, and harpsichord trio, he found the path of early music enticing for its unknowns in terms of repertoire and creative possibilities. Additionally, the pressure to become a trained orchestral player felt limiting to Preston. He described the process of training exclusively to be an orchestral musician as, “a very fossilized thing to do,” meaning that the institutional protocols, rigorous lifestyle, and performance aesthetic were not his calling.116
The next stage in Preston’s early music career would take him to Belgium, where he studied with well-known viola da gamba player Wieland Kuijken.117 At the time, Preston had not personally heard any Baroque flute players who were as convincing musically as the gambist
Kuijken. Preston studied with him primarily to learn about Baroque performance and always admired his “poetic and inspired” playing.118 His experiences as a student of Kuijken differed from those as a student of Gilbert notably in the approach to specific repertoire interpretation.
Regarding his modern flute teacher, Geoffrey Gilbert, Preston recalls being told how to play certain passages of music. To Preston, the mindset that there is only one way to play something runs counter to his creative spirit. These early experiences as a student contributed to his growing dissatisfaction with following the predetermined orchestral career path, which seemed like the only professional option at the time. Regarding Kuijken’s pedagogical approach, he simply says,
“Wieland [Kuijken] would say, ‘play something,’ and just talk to me about it.”119
The countercultural open-mindedness demonstrated in the pedagogy of early music contrasted starkly to his classical training as a flutist, and the student’s active role became central to the learning process. On teaching, Preston says:
116 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 117 Wieland Kuijken is a highly-regarded pioneer of early music in the twentieth century. He plays the viola da gamba and early cello, is originally from Belgium, and formed the Kuijken Early Music Group with brothers Sigiswald (violin) and Barthold (flute). See “Wieland Kuijken,” Robert Adelson, accessed April 3, 2018, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/wieland-kuijken-mn0001665343/biography. 118 Stephen Preston, e-mail message to author, April 22, 2018. 119 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 40 Teaching became so boring because you’d expect people to be inquiring and they’re not. I think that teaching is about helping people to find out partly what is, possibly, a way of playing. Everything I learned I found for myself, and I still do. I mean, that was what was great about going to Wieland. All I got was his experience, which was a lot.120
As a student, Preston is very inquiring, and as a result, he cultivated his own learning process in early music. In addition to studying with Kuijken, he remarked that both he and
Trevor Pinnock began by reading and studying primary sources such as the C. P. E. Bach,
Quantz, Hotteterre, and Corette treatises. He also acknowledges the role of interpretation as a subjective and important aspect of performance saying, “If you and I read the same words about how to do something, play something, we’re going to interpret them differently.”121
Authenticity and “Being Who You Are”
A discussion of authenticity in early music is often unavoidable, regardless of one’s opinion on the matter. Upon broaching the topic of authenticity in early music, Preston became reflective. He states,
We thought that if you read the books and you played as I did, [on] the original instruments, you’d be playing as they did: ‘authentically.’ And that was it. It was very naïve, incredibly naïve. But, it was good in a sense. How do you drive yourself to do something which nobody else is doing? I gave up playing Boehm flute, and my career was okay to do this, and actually, the trio, we did do quite a lot of Baroque music on modern instruments. But again, this idea that you just promote [yourself], you just went and did it—you know, we just did it—and we believed in it. I think the concept of authenticity served us very well when we were innocent, genuinely innocent about it. Because we didn’t question. We were fanatical about it, I suppose, and pretty arrogant I would have thought, quite honestly. We really thought we were special. I mean, it was ridiculous! We started from nothing, and then just grew.122
120 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 41 Preston makes an interesting observation about what constitutes the modern conception of early music. The most visibly objective way to define early music in opposition to modern music is by looking at their respective instruments. Preston says,
There’s an interesting thing about the whole early music scene, which I think is unconsciously built not on what things are, but on what they aren’t. My idea was [that] a Baroque flute is not a modern flute, a harpsichord is not a piano, a viola da gamba is not a cello. That is not to say that there haven’t been very good responses to the materials, but it’s been our responses to those materials, not an eighteenth-century one. And why would it be? We can’t go back [in time].123
Additionally, Preston mentions a flaw with studying period sources, in which the filter of culture influences interpretation. A person’s own culture is a filter that negates the potential to be fully
“authentic.” His view is that these sources go through filters of centuries, culture, language translation, and one’s own interpretative lenses. He says, “The fact is that picking up an eighteenth-century flute or a nineteenth-century flute, or even a 1950s flute, you won’t play it like they did because you just don’t have that sound in your head.”124
The conversation turned briefly to deeper impressions of authenticity’s meaning.
Preston’s insights reflect the subjective natures inherent in performances and people and how this translates to interpretation in early music. He also expresses his thoughts on personal authenticity:
I think being authentic is being who you are. Whatever that is at that particular moment. It’s not pretending you can be something else. And in performing music, I take authenticity to be not a question of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ performance, ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ but right or wrong in the sense that is that person being an authentic musician? Are they saying what they’re saying, or are they saying what somebody else is saying, or are they saying, as happens so much in performance, that they’re not being as they are, they’re being as they think they ought to be, which is very inauthentic.125
123 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 42 Preston acknowledges the freedom that early music provided to escape what felt like rigidity in traditional, classical music training. He acknowledges the importance of research by way of books because it reminds any individual that “ours” is not the only way of playing. The most important thing is to find out how the music works, and as Preston says, “The way it goes is always the way it goes this time, for me, now.”126 He acknowledges the subjective experience in research and performance that may render the same piece differently in the process of interpretation.
Despite authenticity’s inherent flaw of objectification, Preston discusses the authenticity endeavor as a means for personal expression through music. He says, “Performance-practice opens up how you feel about music, particularly at a personal level.”127 The most important thing is knowing what you want to say with the music and saying it. Preston’s perspective encourages others to express integrity in the preparation and performance of early music. The best effort put forth by any individual is the most crucial part of the artistic process.
Beyond Traverso: Baroque Dance and Ecosonics
As a Baroque flute player, Stephen Preston garnered success as a performer, recording artist, collaborator, and teacher. However, he became somewhat disenchanted with life as a recording artist and developed a deep interest in other avenues of performance, especially
Baroque dance. In following this interest, he formed two dance companies. Through the process of learning more about the physicality of Baroque dance, he developed an even deeper knowledge and understanding of eighteenth-century music and performance-practice. He says,
“Working with [Baroque] dance made me realize [that] we kind of lose the physicality of
126 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 127 Ibid. 43 playing. It made me realize how physical playing an instrument is. You can see it on an instrument like the cello, but you don’t feel it on the flute.”128
In terms of performance-practice, Preston states that this understanding of physicality means that, “You can’t just suddenly speed up or slow down. You can’t do giant ‘rits’ [ritards] at the end of pieces – I mean, will people start moving in slow motion?”129 This knowledge was helpful in developing his interpretations of eighteenth-century Baroque flute music. To teach physicality based on Baroque dance principles, Preston will have people tap their feet, which he says often solves any phrasing problems. He also emphasizes that pulse is much more important than metronomic beating, and non-dance music requires flexibility within the pulse.
In addition to forming two dance companies, Preston’s doctoral research led him to develop ecosonics, which uses birdsong as a basis for new techniques and improvisation on the
Baroque flute. From his perspective, the ecosonics project was just as ambitious and ambiguous as picking up an early music instrument in the 1960s or ‘70s. According to the description on his personal website, “Ecosonics explores the possibilities and politics of [humanity’s] affective relationship to sound and uses it as a starting point for raw music making.”130 Preston uses the ecosonics fingering system that he developed as a tool for imitating birdsong in Baroque flute improvisation. Preston says of his process with ecosonics,
So, I thought, ‘Oh, well, doing this research will be similar [to doing early music] because nobody had ever done anything like it.’ The way I did the research was very similar [to early music research]—from books. This time I got all the stuff on Boehm flute extended techniques. I ended up looking at the Delusse method. He has a whole section on what he calls ‘Greek enharmonic scales,’ but, in fact, they’re what we call quartertones. And then I decided to treat the flute as an open system, just as an object, so
128 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 129 Ibid. 130 “Ecosonics,” Stephen Preston, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.stephenpreston- ecosonics.com/ecosonics.html. 44 that there was nothing that it should or shouldn’t do. I developed a fingering system (econsonics) which was based on binary arithmetic.131
Ecosonics, like Baroque flute playing, exemplifies Preston’s own expression of integrity through his work and creative endeavors. In comparing his Baroque flute career and his development of ecosonics, he says,
When I went over from Boehm flute to Baroque flute, I thought I was really breaking down barriers in myself and about what I thought constituted music and playing, and I thought I was very open-minded about it. I found for myself that almost any sounds can become music if we use them in a certain way. I thought that playing Baroque music was hard, but no one really knew anything about [this], and it really is like going into the total dark. So, that’s what the research was like—complete blackness. Everything I thought about music and playing the flute changed.132
Preston’s pioneering spirit led him to shift his successful career as a classically-trained flutist to that of an early music specialist. He then began two Baroque dance companies, and he later developed the ecosonics system while doing post-graduate work. These are only three examples of how he has reinvented himself time and again based on his interests and desire to explore uncharted territory.
The Spirit of an Early Music Pioneer
Through his own expressions of integrity, Stephen Preston exemplifies what it means to be an early music pioneer. Preston was self-trained on the Baroque flute, his mentors were also new to early music in its twentieth-century context, and the variety and innovation reflected in his professional endeavors have left a mark on both the flute and the early music worlds. In each of these endeavors, Preston’s desire has always been to, “find out how music works.”133
131 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 45 Exploration and the idea that, “music moves you,” is also central to his life philosophy about making music and experiencing performance. Preston says that,
In the way that we learn and play, we’re told that we can think everything, but thinking isn’t music. Part of what we want out of music is nothing to do with greatness or anything. We want sensation. And that is what early music offered too, it offered a different sensation and still does.134
When asked about early music performance in the twenty-first century, Preston sees the current scene as less of a revolution or breakthrough compared to what it was when he began playing Baroque flute. When asked how he envisions the trajectory of early music today, Preston is uncertain where the movement will go. He says,
[Today,] there are far more people who are fantastically good players than there are people who are ‘innovators’ pushing new work, and it becomes hard to push something new into something which has already taken such strong form. When we started there was nothing, which is kind of weird looking back on it. Everybody was in the dark. What other music has been made purely from a textual basis? The whole historical performance ‘thing’ was experimental, [and] we kind of built music on a totally mythical foundation. Early music stirred the pot for a while, and I think it still can.135
Preston embodies the kind of innovator he describes through the fascinating trajectory of his life from the Baroque flute and beyond. His strong belief in his work and the effort made to evolve as a performer, musician, and person manifest as expressions of integrity.
134 Stephen Preston, interview by author, Ayr, Scotland, August 8, 2017. 135 Ibid. 46 CHAPTER 4
JED WENTZ
Jed Wentz’s creative and scholarly endeavors captured my attention when I began learning to play the Baroque flute. I read several of his articles on the current aesthetics of early music and his work on eighteenth-century acting, and I listened to a number of his Baroque flute recordings. The opportunity to meet in person arrived when Jed was a featured guest artist at the
2017 National Flute Association Convention in Minneapolis, MN. Before our interview, I heard him perform live during the Friday Evening Gala Concert and observed his Baroque flute masterclass for advanced players. Despite the hustle and bustle that can dominate convention- going, our conversation was thought-provoking both for the depth with which Wentz discusses into philosophical uncertainties and through his own mastery of period-specific concepts and ways of thinking.
Training Oneself: Education and Models
Jed Wentz (b. 1960) grew up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and began flute lessons at a young age. He first studied with renowned flutists such as Walter S. Mayhall and James
Walker.136 His early years of flute study were devoted to orchestral preparation and training as he became familiar with standard orchestral excerpts and flute repertoire. He attended the Oberlin
Conservatory where he studied silver flute with Robert Willoughby and Baroque flute with
136 Walter S. Mayhall (1924-2015) was flutist with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, and principal flute with the Youngstown Symphony. He taught at the Cleveland Music School and Youngstown State University. See “Walter S. Mayhall,” McCauley Funeral Home, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.mccauleyfuneral.com/notices/Walter-Mayhall; Jim Walker is well-versed in classical, orchestral, jazz, pop, and cinema music. He has held principal flute positions with the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He currently teaches at Colburn and USC. See “Jim Walker,” Jim Walker, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.jimwalkerflute.com/. 47 Michael Lynn.137 He says that even upon entering college, he was quite sure that making a living as an orchestral musician was not what he wanted to do in the long run.
Like many undergraduate flute students, Wentz had to undergo an embouchure change that left him feeling discouraged. During what he refers to as this “crisis period,” he decided to join Oberlin’s Collegium Musicum ensembles where he played hurdy-gurdy, gothic harp, and regal. He also began playing different historical flutes and immediately fell in love with the sound and the feeling of playing the instruments. He says,
It was the experience of playing on wood that made me go into early music. The sound of wood was warmer, and I felt that I could manipulate the sound more finely, more precisely, more expressively. I felt intimately connected to the instrument, also that I could express myself better, and more subtly.138
Wentz reflects that the instrument and the repertoire offered him a full range of possibilities for self-expression. He also cites his love for eighteenth-century French music as another important influence on his decision to pursue early music.
Wentz describes himself as being very typical for his generation. While in school, he was heavily involved in contemporary music as well as early music through his exposure to period instruments as a part of the Collegium at Oberlin. What made him feel “typical” of the 1970s was his interest in, “everything that wasn’t standard classical repertoire and being encouraged to think outside of the box.”139 He says that, “early music is part of this 1960s mindset of, ‘Wow,
137 Robert Willoughby (1921-2018) was assistant principal with the Cleveland Orchestra with George Szell and taught at the Oberlin Conservatory beginning in 1949. He later taught at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. See “Robert Willoughby,” Boston Records, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.bostonrecords.com/robert-willoughby-1/; Michael Lynn is Professor of Recorder and Baroque Flute at the Oberlin Conservatory. He is an avid historical flute collector and presents lectures on early instruments. See “Michael Lynn,” Oberlin College and Conservatory, accessed April 3, 2018, https://www.oberlin.edu/michael- lynn. 138 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 139 Ibid. 48 let’s do something new.’”140 This desire to pursue early music led him to Amsterdam, where he studied with Baroque flutist Barthold Kuijken at The Royal Conservatoire The Hague.141
Wentz recalls being amazed upon hearing a recording of Kuijken, describing him as,
“someone who had contact with the instrument.”142 Wentz has great respect for him because, “he can do exactly what he wants on the instrument.”143 However, Wentz also looks back on his move to Amsterdam and remembers his own naïveté. His first impressions upon arriving at The
Hague to study with Kuijken deflated some of his previous enthusiasm. Of his experience, he says,
I went [to Amsterdam] in ’82. So, the whole [early music] thing is, at this point, still an adventure. When I [first] heard Bart playing, and it was so distant, and so impersonal, I was absolutely shocked. It shows you how naïve I was to go study with him.144
To Wentz, he and Kuijken were not as compatible in their initial relationship as student and teacher. He recalls what his expectations were for studying early music at the time, saying,
The myth is that you’re free. You’re not constrained. You don’t have to play Beethoven symphonies. You don’t have to play the way someone tells you—all of this. And I’m going [into early music] because I want to have a better contact with the instrument which I already feel gives me access to my personal expression.145
Unfortunately, he recalls finding that his original conception and expectations were not aligned with reality. Although Kuijken’s playing was incongruous with Wentz’s desire to play musically and with emotion, over time, he began to understand the wider context in which the Dutch
140 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 141 Barthold Kuijken is one of the most prominent early music specialists and flutists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He has numerous recordings on historical flutes, he teaches at the Bruges Conservatory, the Brussels Royal Conservatory of Music, and Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and he has played with numerous early music ensembles including La Petite Bande, Parnassus Ensemble, and Collegium Aureum. See “Barthold Kuijken,” Robert Cummings, accessed April 3, 2018, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/barthold-kuijken- mn0001651116/biography; The Royal Conservatoire The Hague is the oldest conservatory in the Netherlands. See “Royal Conservatoire,” Juliana van Stolberlaan, accessed April 3, 2018, https://www.koncon.nl/en/about-kc/royal- conservatoire. 142 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 49 School approach to early music unfolded. He recalls the religious, philosophical, and political factors that shaped the way early music was approached in earlier decades. This approach was influenced by late nineteenth-century reverence for “the work” so that it was not contaminated by human expression. In his words, “Playing with personality was a bad thing. It meant you were egotistical, selfish, and a nineteenth-century virtuoso. So, when I arrived [at The Hague], I was under a lot of criticism because I wanted to play well. Playing too well was a bad thing.”146
Wentz’s later reflections on his experiences at The Hague allowed him to empathize more easily with Kuijken’s perspective and way of approaching both early music and Baroque flute playing. He concluded that Kuijken wanted Wentz to find his own way, rather than imitate or mimic whatever the teacher did. Part of this process of discovery had to do with breaking the automatic relationship one has with the silver flute and treating the Baroque flute like its own instrument. Wentz says he subsequently spent his time figuring out his own technique while asking a lot of pointed questions. In the end, the two musicians agreed to disagree in terms of philosophies for approaching the Baroque flute. According to Wentz,
Bart’s philosophy is that you have weak notes on the flute, so you make everything fit the weakest note, which is correct, I think, because otherwise you can’t get a beautifully modulated sound. But, in my opinion, you first have to make the weak notes as loud as you can, and that’s where he and I differ. And so, I tried to make the flute sound as strong as possible but still to take care to be able to modulate with the weakest notes. And I built my technique on the way I understood Quantz, which could be completely wrong, but it’s my understanding, and that’s all I’ve got. I can’t understand it any other way.147
Wentz’s early educational experiences in the United States in the late 1970s coupled with his later experiences in Holland in the early 1980s gives him a unique perspective on Baroque flute playing and approaches to early music. Today, he has garnered success as a performer,
146 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 147 See Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, trans. Edward R. Reilly (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001); Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 50 scholar, eighteenth-century expert, and teacher in a variety of subject areas, some of which will be explored below. First, a brief discussion on pedagogy will take place from his perspective as a teacher rather than as a student.
Training Others: Early Music Pedagogy
Jed Wentz firmly believes in the subjective experience of every individual. As mentioned above, all that he can rely on is his own understanding of Quantz, even if it means that his interpretations will differ from those of another. His advice for those pursuing early music today takes into account the subjective experience of the student but also challenges students to be inquisitive and analytical about how they arrive at conclusions in the decision-making process. In
Wentz’s words, his goal as a teacher is simple: “Maybe there is something there that I can impart to you so that you get closer to what it is that you really want to do.”148
In his opinion, one aspect of today’s learning process that causes some frustration is the lack of deep engagement with historical sources. His view is that, “Very few people have really engaged properly with the sources, passionately, and deeply. And that’s okay, but then don’t tell me, ‘I just want to play fast’ or that I have no taste.”149 He finds it of the utmost importance that early music performers know what they are talking about so that they can then make informed and honest choices in their interpretations.
With regard to research, he says, “If you want your life to have meaning, and not be playing a game, then [the research] never ends. When you think [about] music from the way
[eighteenth-century people] were trained, then you have a real chance of getting some kind of
148 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 149 Ibid. 51 understanding.”150 For example, in a treatise class that Wentz taught, the students looked at eighteenth-century tempo sources and various twentieth-century musicological interpretations of eighteenth-century tempi. However, Wentz found no evidence that students took this approach into their practice rooms or performances.
The continuous process of doing research is necessary if you are looking at early music as a viable and sustainable career option. In his words, “It must be important to you.”151 The time and energy Wentz has spent in his life with historical sources is part of his incredibly strong foundation for deriving interpretations that speak to performance-practice principles.
Dodging the Authenticity “Kool-Aid”
Jed Wentz is an incredibly independent-minded individual. His perspective on authenticity in early music is just another example of how his own expression of personal integrity did not need the validation of the masses in order for him to pursue his goals or find success. Regarding authenticity, he simply says,
The thing is, I never drank the Kool-Aid. I never thought that I could ever play like they played in the eighteenth-century…maybe for one day when I first got [to Amsterdam] or after I’d been [at The Hague] for six months or something, but once I started doing my own stuff, I never pretended that I could know what [music in the eighteenth century] had sounded like.152
Wentz discussed how the arguments for or against authenticity were nonsensical to him because authenticity is never achievable. The moral debate in the 1980s was not one he would partake in, and to Wentz, authenticity in music does not exist now, it did not exist in the 1980s,
150 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid. 52 and it did not exist in other eras either. His own conception of authenticity in early music is closer to the following:
For me, it’s really quite clear. Certainly now, authenticity means to me that I, as a twenty- first century person, have a relationship with eighteenth-century sources. And I, as much as I can, attempt to educate myself according to eighteenth-century sources, which in and of themselves are not a monolithic set of rules that always are in agreement. But, if I were an eighteenth-century person, I would be formed by sources and then, according to my personality and my capabilities, [I] would perform sometimes in agreement with the sources and, perhaps, sometimes not.153
The subjective experience of the individual is valuable here. Wentz lives his life through a very personal, subjective lens that is informed by his experiences and his interactions with subjects and objects alike. His approach to early music performance falls within this purview.
In recognizing his subjective position as an interpreter of eighteenth-century music on the
Baroque flute, Wentz also understands the ephemeral nature of subjectivity, in which change is inevitable and shifts are always occurring. He reflects on this by saying, “[My interpretation] is authentic to me, and it comes authentically from me.” 154 Wentz has extensive training in the interpretation of eighteenth-century sources, but he still comments on how his perspective on those sources has shifted even within the span of his career.
To conclude the discussion of authenticity, Wentz speculates that if an eighteenth-century recording, “a miraculous, eighteenth-century CD,” were to be found, almost everyone would be devastated by it and hate hearing the music performed in that way. 155 He says that, “[At least] one thing that everyone believes [to be true and holds dear about historical performance-practice] would be refuted by a recording, because I can’t believe it can be otherwise.”156 Looking at Jed
153 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid. 53 Wentz’s career, individuality and integrity meet to form strong convictions as well as equally strong interests.
A Passion for The Passions
Jed Wentz is a specialist in many areas, only one of which is Baroque flute and early music. Wentz is also an expert in eighteenth-century acting, and for his PhD, he did extensive research on gesture, specifically on the French operatic stage. He also examined the relationship between gesture, acting, and freedom of tempo. He says, “I was fascinated by the prospect that gestures could influence musical tempo, and that’s the way that I entered into this world of acting.”157 Wentz’s research process first took him to Baroque dance because all of the eighteenth-century opera actors in France were required to have dance training. He describes the
Baroque dance experience of the French upper class as, “a kinetic language they would have understood.”158
Additionally, Wentz is fascinated with rhetoric, another area in which actors would have been well-trained. Action, or delivery, is the most important aspect of rhetoric, which also applies to musical performance. Wentz explains that the tenets of creating a good performance were declamation, or the art of oratorical speaking, and the use of gestures. However, after the second world war, high German speakers stopped rolling their “Rs” the way actors were trained to do because Hitler was widely known for using elements of declamation and gesture to manipulate a crowd by means of pathos, or by emotional appeal. Wentz discusses this facet of acting in terms of the Passions, which were emotional states such as anger, happiness, or sadness, etc. To evoke the passions, Wentz says, “You must believe it yourself. If you believe it
157 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 158 Ibid. 54 strongly enough yourself, it will appear in your eye, and once it’s in your eye, it will go to the audience. Now, there’s all this talk now about mirror neurons that would fit perfectly with this way of [thinking].159
Even today, discussions of mirror neurons in which a person may react to someone else’s look of sadness is similar to how eighteenth-century people discussed the passions. In terms of performance-practice, Wentz believes that the body is the pathway for twenty-first century musicians to understanding how the music of the eighteenth-century works because expressing emotion is hardwired in humans.
For me, [the Passions are] a starting point that we cannot easily understand because we don’t like it. After the second world war, everyone was afraid of rhetoric. And sweeping people away emotionally made people feel uncomfortable. [In Amsterdam,] I felt so shocked that my personal expression would be considered dishonest and egotistical when I simply wanted to express what was in my heart about the music as directly as possible to other people. I needed stronger emotions in that music, and you see in the acting that they went all over the place emotionally and the Passions were extremely strong.160
Wentz’s all-encompassing work on acting techniques has contributed to his rich knowledge about eighteenth-century practices that help inform and shape the integrity of his own performances.
The Future of Early Music
Jed Wentz is a true revolutionary. This is evidenced by the depth of his research endeavors and the seriousness with which he takes his performing art. His advice to students of early music is simple. He says, “First of all, [you must] really love the music. You have to believe in what you do.”161 He believes that previous generations of early music proponents were
159 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid. 55 authentic to themselves in what they did, even those whose philosophies reflected an objectivist approach to making music that is counter to his own philosophy. With regard to artists who began the early music movement, he says, “I think there is no way for anything to succeed that does not have that level of conviction and sincerity. That really is the number one thing.”162
Wentz is critical of today’s early music scene, but there seems to be some hope that the opportunity exists for a new generation to pave its own path. When asked what he believes the future outlook of early music is, he boldly states,
Early music is doomed. Early music now is a style of playing that was invented forty years ago and is transmitted as truth to a group of young people who are, mostly, uninterested in accessing the sources themselves. As long as that remains the case, early music will grow increasingly out of touch for the generation for whom it’s being played, and it will die. We need to rethink the performative language, and that has to come from a deep need within a couple of charismatic young performers to start a new movement. We need to be overthrown. I say this to all my students: you have to - you must - overthrow us. You must for the sake of the music, and the music deserves to be heard. Find a language that speaks to now by authentically engaging with the sources. And get out of it what today gets out of it, not what 1980 got out of it. Otherwise, early music will die, but, maybe early music needs to die so that a new generation can rediscover it properly. I can’t see what needs to be overthrown in my work, but somebody needs to tell me I did it all wrong.163
The level of conviction in Wentz’s words is a reminder that early music in modern times is primarily concerned with people. Individuals shape early music’s integrity as a performance art. Performers always have a choice about the way they engage with period sources and how their own subjectivity helps to breathe life into the live performance experience. The Baroque flute is a vehicle for Jed Wentz to express his personal and musical voice, but he also expresses integrity through his own research process. He brings early music to life by embodying his own subjective understanding of the sources and through the process of interpretation.
162 Jed Wentz, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 12, 2017. 163 Ibid. 56 CHAPTER 5
SARAH PAYSNICK
Sarah Paysnick was one of the first guest artists I encountered as a doctoral flute student at Florida State University. At the time, I was beyond excited at the prospect of learning how to play the one-keyed flute, and I walked away inspired after hearing her give a recital and masterclass. It struck me to see someone with a successful early music career in today’s world.
Here was an American woman from a younger generation whose own path reflects the professional journey of many of today’s young musicians. Sarah and I met for an interview while at the 2017 National Flute Association Convention in Minneapolis, MN. Her journey to the world of early music reflects the ubiquity of period performance-practice ideas and opportunities that have spread throughout the past several decades, pointing to where early music might head in the future.
Components of an Early Music Education
Period Instruments
Baroque flutist Sarah Paysnick is originally from Massachusetts, and she was first introduced to period instruments by her aunt who plays viola da gamba. The summer after she graduated college, her aunt suggested to her that she call the Von Huene Workshop to see if they were hiring.164 She was invited for an interview and recalls of the experience, “I had dressed
164 In 1960, Friedrich von Huene was one of the first people to make Baroque flutes and recorders in the United States. He had studied modern flute making with Powell Flutes and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study original period instruments in Europe. Von Huene is now a renowned early instrument maker specializing in Baroque flutes, recorders, and woodwinds. See “About Us,” Von Huene, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.vonhuene.com/t-about.aspx. 57 nicely for the interview, but they decided I was dressed too nicely—I was clearly not going to be learning how to make instruments.”165 She got the job, though she did not make any instruments for the company.
Paysnick mostly worked in sales where she did packing, shipping, and taking orders. She says that while she was working at Von Huene, she pondered learning to play the instruments they make and sell. She says, “I had this plan of going into the basement and playing around with the Baroque flute during [my] lunch hour. I bought one of their [flutes] and just started teaching myself from Jan Boland’s book.”166 Her first encounter with the Baroque flute required an element of trial and error. She says,
I think that the first time I put the flute to my face I couldn’t get a sound out. Some people just pick it up and they can play it. I was like, ‘Wait, where’s the tone hole? Where do I blow?’ It took a couple of tries. I really liked the sound. It was fun to feel the air under my fingers. You just feel like you’re so close to the instrument. There’s less between you and what you’re doing.167
At this point in her life, Sarah Paysnick was a professionally-trained flutist with an undergraduate degree in modern flute performance. Despite her level of experience and musical abilities, picking up a new instrument was instructive and became a teaching tool in and of itself.
In recalling her initial contact with the instrument as a beginner, she remembers working on intonation much more with the Baroque flute, and this influenced her modern flute playing as well. Additionally, she felt that her contact with the traverso illuminated things about eighteenth- century flute repertoire that she had not previously pondered. This has influenced her approach to earlier repertoire and is one aspect of her own approach to performance-practice. She explains,
You learn so much playing the music on the instrument that the composer was familiar with (or pretty close to the instrument the composer was familiar with) because if you’re
165 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 166 See Janice Dockendorff Boland, Method for the One-Keyed Flute (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 167 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 58 really listening to the instrument, [and] you’re trying to do something that the instrument doesn’t want to do, it’ll tell you. You know you can’t play a really loud E or G# on a Baroque flute. It doesn’t happen. So, if a composer wrote that note, they don’t want it to be blasting, they want it to be really special.168
Today, Paysnick has four instruments that she uses regularly for a variety of musical genres, eras, and national styles. These include a copy of a 1725 Pierre Naust Paris flute used for
Telemann, Bach, or French music; a one-keyed, 1760 August Grenser copy by Rod Cameron for
Mozart, Haydn, Quantz, or C. P. E. Bach; a four-keyed, 1810 Heinrich Grenser copy by Boaz
Berney, and an eight-keyed 1800 Heinrich Grenser copy by Jan de Winne used to play
Mendelssohn. She adds, “The Grenser’s were making a number of [flutes with different] keys at the same time. It’s as close as I’m going to get.”169 These instruments all shaped the repertoire, just as the repertoire, in turn, shaped styles of instrument making. Like the early music pioneers from generations before her, Paysnick’s first instruction came from her experiences of playing the Baroque flute itself.
Teachers and Institutions
Sarah Paysnick completed her undergraduate degree in flute at Ithaca College in New
York state with Wendy Mehne.170 Later, she studied with Jill Felber in Santa Barbara, CA, while also taking Baroque flute lessons with Sherril Wood, a local teacher in Santa Monica.171 She says, “At that point, [I] thought that Baroque flute would be something that I would do on the
168 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 169 Ibid. 170 Wendy Mehne is Professor of Flute at Ithaca College and is a solo and chamber musician, recording artist, and a contributing author for The Flutist Quarterly, Flute Talk, and the Instrumentalist. See “The Flute Studio of Wendy Mehne,” Ithaca College, accessed April 3, 2018, https://faculty.ithaca.edu/mehne/. 171 Jill Felber teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is a recording artist, solo and chamber musician, and contemporary music specialist. See “Jill Felber,” The Regents of the University of California, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.music.ucsb.edu/people/jill-felber; Sherril Wood teaches Baroque flute, recorder, and silver flute lessons in the Oregon and California areas. See “Sherril Wood,” Sherril Wood, accessed April 9, 2018, http://www.sherrilwood.com/. 59 side, and that it wasn’t going to be my life.”172 She subsequently attended Boston University to work with Marianne Gedigian,173 who she had dreamed of working with since she was in high school.
While at Boston University, Paysnick was a part of the Baroque chamber music ensemble under the direction of Martin Pearlman, but she transferred to the University of Texas at Austin the next year to continue studying with Gedigian.174 Unfortunately, UT-Austin had recently cut their early music program, but she was still able to seek out lessons with the Baroque flutist in the area, Marcus McGuff.175 Upon finishing her masters in flute, Paysnick says that she realized that her goal with modern flute was to study with Gedigian. Suddenly, she felt like she did not know what she wanted to do professionally with the modern flute.
It was at this time that Paysnick moved back to Boston where she worked in the Von
Huene shop for a few years. She took lessons with Na’ama Lion, who had recently been hired at
The Longy School in Boston. 176 Paysnick auditioned and was accepted to Longy, where she continued her studies with Lion and earned her Graduate Performers Diploma, or GPD. She says,
“The community at Longy is really warm and welcoming, and the teachers all treat the students
172 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 173 Marianne Gedigian is Professor of Flute at The University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music. She has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was principal flute of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra. She is a renowned flute soloist and teacher. See “Marianne Gedigian,” Flute Studio: Butler School of Music, accessed April 3, 2018, https://flute.music.utexas.edu/faculty/. 174 Martin Pearlman is an American conductor, four-time Grammy nominated artist, and founder of the Boston Baroque. See “Biography,” Martin Pearlman, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.martinpearlman.com/. 175 Marcus McGuff is a Baroque flute and modern flute player based in Austin, TX. He is a member of La Follia Austin Baroque, and he studied Baroque flute with Wilbert Hazelzet, Michael Lynn, and Jed Wentz. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at Austin Community College. See “Marcus McGuff, Baroque Flute (Traverso),” La Follia Austin Baroque, accessed April 9, 2018, http://lafollia.org/artist-marcus-mcguff/. 176 Na’ama Lion teaches at the Longy School of Music and is well-known in Boston as a performer on historical flutes. She has played with early music groups such as La Donna Musicale, Boston Baroque, the Handel and Haydn Society, Grand Harmonie, to name a few. See “Na’ama Lion – Historical Flutes,” Na’ama Lion, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.naamalion.com/bio/. 60 as if they’re colleagues, and a lot of the students were at a pretty high level. We learned a lot from [our teachers]. We got to play side-by-side with them all the time.”177
Sarah Paysnick’s educational background reflects a typical relationship between students and institutions of higher education in the United States. Her continued pursuit and assertiveness in seeking out Baroque flute instruction and early music collaborative experiences are what ultimately directed her path to the professional sphere of early music. While the opportunities to find teachers for Baroque flute were greater than those in previous generations, her journey to an institutional setting with an established early music program and curriculum required both persistence and passion.
Musical Influences
Today, it is possible to have role models for pursuing a career in early music and developing musicianship, including individual performers, recordings, and colleagues. This also holds true for twenty-first century Baroque flutist Sarah Paysnick. She first compares James
Galway’s career as a flute soloist to Bart Kuijken’s career in early music, saying, “Galway is the guy who made it possible for flutists to have a career. He created this sound and solo “thing.”
Bart is sort of the equivalent for Baroque flutists. His sound is so beautiful, and he got to such a high level. [Kuijken] is why we can play traverso [professionally].”178 She also cites Jed Wentz as an influence for her playing, especially after she had the opportunity to work with him at the
International Baroque Institute at Longy in Boston. Additionally, recordings play a role in how early music is perceived over time. She says that her favorite recordings of historical performance interpretations are those in which the music has energy, motion, and intensity.
177 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 178 Ibid. 61 Regular inspiration also comes from colleagues, including fellow Baroque flute player
Andrea LeBlanc, who, Paysnick says, has a beautiful sound that she herself tries to emulate when she is playing.179 Regarding the influence of her colleagues, she says, “I learn a lot from working with other people, and so a lot of my knowledge is not first-hand. I, ‘read the treatise and interpreted it,’ but I also just picked up how people in Boston interpret that knowledge.”180 The rich resources available to Paysnick as a twenty-first century Baroque flute player have given her tools and ideas for how she can become the artist she envisions for herself.
Bringing Early Music to Life
The Acquisition of Knowledge
In her pursuit of early music, Sarah Paysnick has gone through several processes of learning in order to derive her own methods for approaching the Baroque flute and its repertoire.
With regard to early music, she says,
One of the things that attracted me to the historical performance family was that everybody seemed so knowledgeable. And then I realized that I actually have to do the research to be that knowledgeable. Silly me—I don’t just learn it by osmosis! I think there are a lot of teachers encouraging their students to read the treatises. I felt like I should read them and study them. I’m the kind of person that probably needs to read it a few times, and also hear it in a lecture, and also have a conversation about it before I really know what it means.181
This intensive work with sources is part of the trade and of being a specialist in early music. She now has the tools to develop her own interpretations while still engaging in an ongoing process of research and application.
179 Andrea LeBlanc is a Baroque flute player in the Boston area. She plays with the Handel and Haydn Society, Boston Baroque, Grand Harmonie, and Cambridge Concentus. She is the principal flutist of Arcadia Players and L’Acadamie. See “Andrea LeBlanc,” Music at Eden’s Edge, accessed April 3, 2018, https://www.edensedge.org/musicians/andrea-leblanc. 180Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 181 Ibid. 62 Paysnick says that the most important things to learn about a piece are its historical context and time period, national style including the composer’s home country versus the country in which the composer worked, and where a piece would have been played, such as in a salon, in a court, or in a church. This contextual information provides a crucial framework for understanding style that allows for a piece to be interpreted in a historically-informed way. This methodical approach to early music combines aspects of research and playing that bring the music to life.
Baroque Flute Techniques: Sound and Articulation
Sound production and articulation are two crucial aspects of playing the Baroque flute that require thoughtful attention and intention. To develop a sound-concept on the Baroque flute,
Paysnick recommends working with the instrument instead of against it. She says,
One thing [Jed Wentz] worked on with me as far as sound was that Quantz talks about a masculine sound. So, you’re not supposed to sound pretty all the time. When I’m playing long tones or working on my sound, I’m trying to feel the resistance with the flute, and I think that when I feel the least resistance is when the sound is the best. And so, I’ll play with the shapes in my mouth and the shape of the embouchure and where I feel the air.182
Articulation is also a complex concept, especially for creating shapes and character in
Baroque music. Paysnick acknowledges the variety of options for articulation patterns as well as the process by which she, herself, finds the best combinations for the music in question, saying,
Are you using a ‘T,’ are you using a ‘D,’ are you using an ‘R,’ are you doing a mix, are you using ‘diddle,’ are you slurring? Then you figure out where the phrases are. I think that I try to find the phrases pretty quickly. If I’m being really good, I’ll record myself and make sure that things are happening the way I want them to happen.183
182 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 183 Ibid. 63 Sound and articulation are only two aspects impacted by the decision-making process of interpretation, and they are not unique to the situation of the Baroque flute. Here, she presents her own approach to sound and articulation on the instrument, which is an amalgamation of information gleaned from primary sources and recommendations from experienced Baroque flute players.
Repertoire and Musical Discoveries
As performers, we often have an affinity for a genre or composer whose music we connect with deeply. For Sarah Paysnick, this composer is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. She admires and enjoys playing his music, as well as some of the individuals within his social sphere.
To explain her love for C. P. E. Bach, Paysnick says,
I was drawn to C. P. E.’s music, I think, through working with Shalev Ad-El and Na’ama Lion, who both also love C. P. E. His music is so weird, so I love the challenge of figuring out what is happening. He’ll take you somewhere and [then] yank you over here. [I like] the fun of doing that for the audience. And his slow movements are just hard, and gorgeous. I just love that.184
Connecting to the music one is playing is part of what contributes to a performance becoming an expression of integrity. She demonstrates passion for her art through her love of the music and instruments that she encounters while developing her career in early music. Expressions of integrity occur from the micro to the macro levels of the research process to the performance.
The quality relayed in Paysnick’s descriptions emphasize the experience of music rather than its resulting outcomes.
184 Shalev Ad-El is an Israeli harpsichordist and conductor. He is a member of Il Gardellino, The Dorian Consort, the Berlin Philharmonic Stradivarius Soloists, and he is the music director of Accademia Daniel and Oslo Baroque Soloists. He has taught at the Dresden Academy for Early Music, the Longy School of music, and Florida State University, among others. See “Shalev Ad-El,” Shalev Ad-El, accessed April 3, 2018, http://www.shalev.at/; Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 64 Disengaging from Authenticity
“Authenticity” was unwelcome in conversation both as a term and as a concept in early music. Sarah Paysnick shares her strong feelings on the subject:
I hate it. I hate the word! It’s a terrible word. It should not be used with historical performance at all. I think, more accurately, we do ‘historically-informed performance.’ Authenticity means you are doing what was done. You’re creating something authentically, something real. We’re not doing that—we can’t. We are using what we know and that is informing our performance. People heard differently then. We’ve heard Wagner and we’ve heard Schoenberg. We can’t not hear that stuff. We can’t un-hear it! So, the way that we hear this music from the eighteenth century is not the same from what [eighteenth-century people] were hearing.185
She demonstrates the now commonly-agreed upon idea that “authentic performance” does not exist. Her generation of early music performers have already abandoned the notion of authenticity as reflected in the mindset of late twentieth and early twenty-first century thought.
As products of the environments and the times, her strong feelings on the matter reflect the generational mindset shift that more fully accounts for subjectivity and the individual experience in the process of researching, recreating, and performing early music.
Paysnick refers, instead, to “historically-informed performance.” The parameters for HIP are the following: “The whole point [of HIP] is that we’re trying to recreate something. We don’t know. We can interpret the treatises that we have, and we can interpret the copies of instruments that we have. We’re doing what we think and what’s pleasing to our ears now.”186 This strong reaction to “authenticity” as a concept is one more example of how limiting the label of authenticity can be for performers of early music. Additionally, Paysnick’s strong identity with early music performers of all generations is visible with the use of “we” to designate a collective entity and belief about authenticity. Bringing early music to life requires commitment and care
185 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 186 Ibid. 65 on the part of every individual. She expresses integrity here by speaking a truth that she herself feels and believes, which also transcends the label of authenticity in its early music context.
The Movement to The Mainstream
Sarah Paysnick has great respect for the pioneers of the early music movement, but she is glad to benefit from the overall higher standard of playing, better access to resources, and the collaborative effort of several generations of early music specialists. Her comments on the movement’s beginnings are,
I think while there was Franz Brüggen and Bart Kuijken and all of his brothers, that there were some good players [at the beginning of the early music movement], but the level of playing has just continued to climb since. There was certainly a feeling of, ‘Well if you can’t play modern, then you should go play these instruments.’ And that is not the case anymore. Those people cannot survive in today’s early music movement. I think people are getting into it a lot younger. A lot of HP [Historical Performance] ensembles are reaching out to younger audiences, and so, kids in high school or younger are exposed to these instruments.187
Additionally, early music today operates in tandem with mainstream classical music training. Paysnick and some of her friends and colleagues have earned degrees or certificates in early music performance-practice through institutions of higher education in the United States and abroad. Early music festivals and workshops abound across the globe, which bring even more opportunities for pedagogical development and student progress on period instruments.
Based on her own experience, three universities in the United States offer undergraduate degrees in early music. The accessibility of early music, knowledgeable teachers, and instruments opens up opportunities for enthusiastic students who wish to pursue this path.
187 Frans Brüggen (1934-2014) was a Dutch pioneer of the early music movement, famous recorder player, and co-founder of the Orchestra of the 18th Century. See “Franz Brüggen, Pioneer in Early Music, Dies at 79,” Vivien Schweitzer, accessed April 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/arts/music/frans-bruggen-pioneer- in-early-music-dies-at-79.html; Ibid. 66 Previously, European institutions such as The Hague were the preeminent training programs for early music professionals. It is now possible to compare the European and
American educational systems with the growth of professional-level early music groups and educational programs at universities in the United States and Canada. Paysnick says that she can almost tell where someone studied or who they studied with based on how they play Baroque flute. She says,
I think that if you go to Europe, there’s a different interpretation; their playing is completely different from the ‘American School’ of [early music]. I feel like I’m one of the first generations to not have studied in Europe and have some sort of career. Everyone studying in the U. S. now—all of their teachers studied in Europe. It’s really hard for me to put my finger on what it is, but the style is different. It is like two people from two different nationalities trying to play the same music. The words that are coming in my head are ‘stopping and starting.’ There’s a lot more harsher articulation in the European/French style.188
Now, several institutions and festivals offer educational opportunities for younger students with well-established musicians, but Paysnick still observes that younger students are often self-starters. She says, “I do notice some younger students who are hungrier and do read treatises.”189 Early music’s beginnings as a counterculture movement have shifted more into mainstream classical music training, allowing more professional-level development and educational opportunities for those interested in pursuing a career in early music in the future.
Playing Early Music in the Twenty-First Century
Sarah Paysnick’s experience of early music has shaped who she is as a Baroque flute player and musician. She began experimenting on Baroque flutes while working at the Von
Huene Shop, and she subsequently sought out teachers and colleagues who share her early music
188 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 189 Ibid. 67 enthusiasms. This led her to study formally at the Longy school with Na’ama Lion and eventually break into the professional early music scene. Paysnick says of her strengths,
I think I’m definitely a chamber musician. I much prefer to have a really nice flute part in an orchestral or chamber setting versus being a soloist. Even playing a solo sonata with piano is not something I care to do. But, I get a lot from my colleagues. It’s fun to see what they do in performance and sort of play off each other.190
Paysnick is the Baroque flutist and treasurer for Grand Harmonie, a period-instrument group that is based in Boston, Massachusetts.191 She enjoys the camaraderie of the group as well as the chance to perform works of varying sizes and instrumentation. She says, “I love doing salon concerts. Coming into an old home and doing a concert in the living room…everything is so intimate, and you can feel everyone’s presence in the room, and they really enjoy it, too, because it’s so up-close.”192
As an early music specialist, one must often have a strong footing in the local community and be willing to work in a variety of capacities to make a living. She says,
I think it’s still hard to make a living exclusively performing on historical instruments. Most people also have to teach or take modern gigs or have some other day job in addition. The gigs do not pay the same most of the time. The pay scale is a lot lower. But I think that the level of playing is getting a lot higher. There’s less forgiveness when [something is] out of tune or [there’s] bad tone or poor technique. And our group [Grand Harmonie], sometimes we struggle with that. [We’ll get comments like,] ‘Well, it’s really good for historical performance.’ We definitely [also] have audience members who say, ‘This is greater than any symphony orchestra I’ve heard.’ And that’s great when we hear that.193
Sarah Paysnick’s success and continuously emerging career as a Baroque flute player allow her to navigate the professional early music scene. She expresses integrity through her own journey by pursuing her passion for early music and Baroque flute playing. Her process and
190 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 191 See “Grand Harmonie,” accessed April 3, 2018, http://grandharmonie.org/. 192 Sarah Paysnick, interview by author, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 11, 2017. 193 Ibid. 68 preparation for performances with groups like Grand Harmonie are part of this expression, and the integrity of her work and artistic creativity is constantly evolving like the face of early music in the twenty-first century.
69 CONCLUSION
THE INTEGRITY OF EARLY MUSIC
The discussion of “being authentic” in early music may be ready to move beyond its twentieth-century connotations to consider “expressing integrity” as an alternative. The holism suggested by expressing integrity applies to both performance experiences and individual expression. Stephen Preston, Jed Wentz, and Sarah Paysnick are examples of individuals who express integrity through their approaches to early music. My interviews with each of them only capture one iteration of their individual expressions of integrity, and their processes of becoming are exemplified in their passion for developing personal philosophies for early music performance-practice.
Early music as it exists today has a much different landscape than its initial beginnings.
The wave of autodidactic performers such as Stephen Preston became the teachers and mentors of the next generation. Jed Wentz studied formally at The Hague and then struck out on his own path that fed his creative and energetic spirit. Finally, even with only a niche population of
Baroque flute players, Sarah Paysnick grew up with access to instruments, recordings, and teachers in the various places she lived and worked in the United States. Now, the wide dissemination of early music and its various philosophies and elements (i.e. instruments, music, performance-practice techniques) are at the fingertips of students such as myself who benefit from its continuously growing body of knowledge.
What does the practice of early music look in the future? Early music of the twentieth- century is no longer recognizable in its original state, but its spirit lives on through individual pursuits to create and communicate musically. Early music gives students the chance to see many possible options in the process of making performance-practice decisions and creating 70 personal interpretations. By having access to early instruments, a love for both the research process and the music, and a teacher who is experienced and knowledgeable, the opportunities afforded to me as a student of early music are beyond what I imagined possible with only modern flute experience. For future students and generations to come, the broader access to shared philosophies on early music provides opportunities for developing research skills, curiosity, body and self-awareness, open-mindedness, empathy through perspective-taking, and multiple layers of meaning and understanding about music. Ultimately, early music is one way in which a student can learn to express individual integrity through musical means.
Expressing integrity in early music becomes a “new” mindset that reinvigorates musicianship, curiosity, and what it means to communicate in performance contexts. This concept also transcends the small sphere of early music performance and can be expanded upon to a human level. Expressing integrity as a way of being promotes vulnerability and connection, which creates empathy among individuals. These are only a few of the infinite number of directions the concept may develop, and there is a need for more voices in this discussion.
Ultimately, expressing integrity upholds that all creative human pursuits are worth being heard, understood, and appreciated.
As I reflect on this project, I envision my own individuality as being one part of the interconnected fabric of human experience. At one micro level, the mediums through which this experience occurs are through playing the Baroque flute and through early music. Expressing integrity at the macro level allows for the identities that define our exteriority and the experiences that shape our interiority to fall away to reveal something shared that is beyond our material entities. Expressions of integrity transcend judgment and are always unfixed and
71 evolving. Although this document resides in a fixed state, its process of creation—my process— is one of impermanence that will express integrity beyond the page’s edge.
72 APPENDIX A
IRB HUMAN SUBJECTS CONSENT AND DOCUMENTATION
IRB Oral History Clearance from Florida State University
Julie Haltiwanger to Laura Clapper on May 26, 2017:
8/16/2017 Gmail - IRB Oral History for DM Treatise
Laura Clapper
IRB Oral History for DM Treatise
Haltiwanger, Julie
Upon review, it has been determined that your protocol is an oral history, which in general, does not fit the defini on of "research" pursuant to the federal regula ons governing the protec on of research subjects. Please be mindful that there may be other requirements such as releases, copyright issues, etc. that may impact your oral history endeavor, but are beyond the purview of this office.
Julie Hal wanger
Office of Research
P O Box 3062742 Tallahassee Fl 32306‐2742
8506447900
Fax 8506444392 [email protected]
From: Clendinning, Jane Sent: Friday, May 26, 2017 1:38 PM To: Hal wanger, Julie
[Texte des messages précédents masqué]
73
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=eacff0ea09&jsver=tDkI92OodXM.fr.&view=pt&msg=15c45dcc7eb4e597&cat=Treatise&search=cat&siml=15c45dcc7eb… 1/1 IRB General Consent Form
Florida State University Oral History Consent Form Approaches to Early Music: Discussions with Baroque Flute Players
This project is being conducted by Laura Clapper, a Doctor of Music candidate in Woodwind Performance (flute) in the College of Music at Florida State University in the United States.
You are invited to participate in an interview regarding your experiences as an early music professional and how you have developed your personal approach to the performance and pedagogy of early music. You are being asked to be a part of this project because you are a successful Baroque flute player who demonstrates a passion for this field. I ask that you read this form and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to be interviewed for this project.
Background Information: The purpose of this project is to illuminate others about the individual experiences of different generations of Baroque flute players. It is my wish to better understand how you came to this profession, and more specifically, what drew you to the flute as a primary instrument. I would also like to explore your individual approach to the pedagogy and performance of early music, how earlier music speaks to you on a personal level, and what kind of future you envision for the practice of early music in the twenty-first century. The information gathered in the interviews will be used solely to better understand and best represent your personal experiences as an early music expert.
Procedures: If you agree to be involved in this project, I would ask you to do the following things: - Agree to sit down for an in-person interview (preferred method) or Skype interview to have a conversation with the interviewer about your experiences. Details of when and where can be discussed in more detail on a case by case basis. The time allotted for this would be anywhere from 2-2.5 hours. - Agree to let the interviewer record and transcribe the interview.
Risks and benefits of being in the Study: There are no foreseeable risks to you, the interviewees, in collecting these oral histories. The benefit to you includes a written record of your valuable impressions of working in this field.
Confidentiality: Due to the nature of this project, it is preferable that you, the interviewees, waive anonymity so your interviews may hold greater meaning for potential readers. The information collected as part of the interviews will be stored electronically and transcribed by the interviewer, with the express permission of the interviewees. The interviewer will maintain confidentiality and discretion regarding any statements or content that an interviewee wishes to remain undocumented as part of the final project. These electronic and transcribed documents will be saved by the interviewer until the completion of the project. If express permission of the interviewees is given, the interviewer will keep these records for educational purposes. However, research information that identifies you may be shared with the FSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) and others who are responsible
74 for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations related to research, including the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP).
Voluntary Nature of the Study: Participation in this study is voluntary. Your decision whether or not to participate will not affect your current or future relations with the University. If you decide to participate, you are free to not answer any question or withdraw at any time without affecting those relationships.
Contacts and Questions: The interviewer conducting the project is Laura Clapper. You may ask any question you have now. If you have a question later, you are encouraged to contact her using the information found below:
Laura Clapper 615 W Saint Augustine St., Apt. 6 Phone: +1-412-860-9165 Tallahassee, FL, U.S.A., 32304 Email: [email protected]
Additionally, the student’s advisor contact information is included below:
Eva Amsler, Professor of Flute, FSU Florida State University College of Music 122 N. Copeland Street Phone: +1-850-644-6727 Tallahassee, FL, U.S.A., 32306 Email: [email protected]
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this project and would like to talk to someone other than the interviewer, you are encouraged to contact the FSU IRB at 2010 Levy Street, Research Building B, Suite 276, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2742, or 850-644-8633, or by email at [email protected].
You will be given a copy of this information to keep for your records.
Statement of Consent: I have read the above information. I have asked questions and have received answers. I consent to participate in the study.
______Signature Date
______Signature of Investigator Date
75 IRB Consent Form Signatures
Stephen Preston, 8/8/2017
Jed Wentz, 8/12/2017
Sarah Paysnick, 8/12/2017
76 Sample Interview Questions
- When did you first become interested in early music or in early instruments? How did you choose the flute? Were there any particular composers, pieces, or people that influenced you while pursuing this path?
- Can you talk about your experiences as a student of the Baroque flute and/or of early music?
- I’d like to talk with you briefly about the term “authenticity.” I am aware that this term holds many connotations within the early music movement that have shifted throughout the last sixty years or so, and I wonder if you could comment on its meaning then and now? Separate from this vantage point of the early music movement, does the term hold any meaning for you on a personal level?
- Can you describe your process for approaching a “new” piece of music? Does this reflect your pedagogical approach in working with students?
- What is the most rewarding aspect of the work that you do?
- What has changed about the music world since you established your career in this field, and what do you envision for the future of early music practice?
77 APPENDIX B
BIOGRAPHIES
Stephen Preston
Stephen Preston’s flute playing began in his teens when he bought a fife at a jumble sale and taught himself to play it. He took up the flute to plug a gap in Haberdashers Askes’ school orchestra. On leaving school he won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music where he studied with Geoffrey Gilbert. In the late sixties Stephen began exploring contemporary music with an ensemble dedicated to the performance of new works by young composers, sponsored by the Arts Council. And he took his first steps in historical performance when he became the flautist in the Galliard Harpsichord Trio, alongside harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock and cellist, Anthony Pleeth. The professional success and musical vitality of the Trio helped lay the foundation of Stephen’s early career, which took a decisive turn after a chance encounter with an eighteenth- century flute. This, and his proximity to the Carse Collection of Wind Instruments housed at the Horniman Museum in South London, led to Stephen teaching himself to play eighteenth- and nineteenth-century flutes using the method books together with a wide range of other historical performance sources. He was invited to become principal flute in all the leading period instrument ensembles and orchestras in the UK as they were founded, including The English Concert, The Academy of Ancient Music, and London Baroque to name but a few, with whom he gave many concert tours and made many recordings. For several years Stephen put his flute playing career on hold in order to pursue his interest in historical dance. He founded two dance companies, the first of which was devoted to 18th century dance, while the second reflected his deepening interest in the relationship between performance forms and the cultures from which they arise. When he returned to the Baroque flute, it was in a more experimental and improvisational vein that reflected his experiences with dance and music. In 2005 he gained a PhD for performance-based research into birdsong as a heuristic model for new techniques and forms of improvisation with the Baroque flute. In 2008 he was youngest player to be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Flute Association of America.194
194 “Stephen Preston,” Stephen Preston, accessed March 15, 2018, http://www.stephenpreston- ecosonics.com/links.html. 78 Jed Wentz
The American flutist and conductor, Jed Wentz, began his flute studies with Walter Mayhall in Youngstown, Ohio, and continued studying with James Walker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied both modern and historical flutes at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music with Robert Willoughby and Michael Lynn. He continued studies with Barthold Kuijken at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, where after three years he received a Soloist's Diploma. Jed Wentz appeared regularly in the USA and Europe as a soloist and recitalist in the 1980's. He began his career as a virtuoso flutist but gradually turned to conducting. He has performed and recorded with groups such as Musica Antiqua Köln, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Capriccio Stravagante Paris and the Gabrieli Consort. In 1992 he founded the Holland-based early music ensemble Musica ad Rhenum (Music on the Rhine) and has appeared as soloist or conductor with them in numerous concerts throughout the world. Wentz has hardly abandoned the flute though - or its early music counterparts like the traverso - but he has, since the 1990's, focused more on the conducting side of his career. In the years following, both Jed Wentz and his ensemble attracted much attention, regularly performing at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and other major venues in Holland, as well as at many European festivals and numerous locales in the USA. Jed Wentz is on the faculty of the Amsterdam Conservatory where he teaches traverso and is a frequent lecturer at London's Royal Academy of Music. Since the 1990's, he devoted much time as well to the understanding and implementation of historically informed music practices. During the 1990's he authored a series of scholarly articles examining eighteenth- century performance practices. He has published articles in Early Music, Concerto, and Tijdschrijft voor Oude Muziek. He is pursuing his doctorate through Leiden University, with his research centering on the relationship between eighteenth-century staging and tempo in the tragedie en musique. As a soloist and conductor Jed Wentz has made well over 20 recordings for a variety of labels, including Vanguard Classics, Brilliant Classics, and Challenge Classics. His first recordings appeared in the early 1990’s and include the critically acclaimed 2-CD set of J. S. Bach sonatas (Vanguard Classics), as well as the Concerto Alla Rustica and other concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. Some of Musica ad Rhenum's members appeared in his early recordings. In 1995 the Fondazione Cini Venetia awarded Wentz a prize for the best recording of Italian music for his Pietro Antonio Locatelli sonatas disc (Vanguard Classics). In the new century he remained active as a conductor and soloist, as well as a teacher.195
195 “Jed Wentz,” Robert Cummings, accessed April 22, 2018, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/jed-wentz- mn0002198844/biography. 79 Sarah Paysnick
A native of Massachusetts, flutist Sarah Paysnick is praised for “[producing] a beautifully tuned (and vibrato free) liquid tone.” (Tom Moore, Early Music America). She performs regularly in the Greater Boston area with many period ensembles including L’Académie, The Berry Collective, Exsultemus, and Harvard Baroque, where she frequently appears as concerto soloist. After winning the National Flute Association’s Baroque Artist competition in August of 2009, she moved to Israel for a year, where she performed with Israel's leading historical performance ensembles: Barrocade, the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra, and Ensemble Phoenix. Upon returning to Boston she co-founded Musical Offering, a period chamber ensemble that explores music linking the high Baroque and Classical styles. In 2012 she co-founded Grand Harmonie, an ensemble of varying size bringing period instrument performances of Classical and Romantic repertoire to the East Coast. As an award-winning modern flutist, Sarah earned a BM at Ithaca College studying with Wendy Mehne, and a MM from the University of Texas at Austin studying with Marianne Gedigian. She also spent a year studying with Jill Felber in Santa Barbara. While studying with Ms. Gedigian, she won the Pappoutsakis Memorial Flute Competition in 2004. After Austin, Sarah returned to Boston and began focusing on Baroque repertoire, though she teaches lessons on both modern and historical flutes. Sarah was appointed Coordinator of Baroque Masterclasses & Competitions for the National Flute Association (NFA) in October of 2012 and will serve a five-year term. She has served on the boards of the Cambridge Society for Early Music (CSEM) and the Pappoutsakis Memorial Flute Competition. In her spare time, Sarah enjoys baking, knitting, and spending time with kids, especially her niece.196
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87 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Laura Clapper concurrently pursued a Doctor of Music in Woodwind Performance - Flute and a Master of Music in Historical Musicology at Florida State University with specialized studies in both Early Music and College Teaching. Laura has performed and taught in the United
States, Europe, and Central America, she is a founding member of the quartet Silver Lining
Flutes, and she has held the second flute/piccolo position with the Penn’s Woods Festival
Orchestra in State College, PA since 2013. She is also an active member of the National Flute
Association and the Florida Flute Association and served as the FFA Piccolo Masterclass
Competition Chair in 2017. Additionally, she has been an elected board member for the Flute
Association at FSU for three years and is currently the organization’s president.
Laura loves to teach, perform, collaborate, read, write, and engage in the research process, all of which have contributed to her interest in early music and this project. Her enthusiasm for music and passion for teaching inspire her to share the joy of music-making with students of all ages. Laura received both Master and Bachelor of Music degrees in flute performance and a Bachelor of Arts in French and Francophone Studies from the Pennsylvania
State University. Laura has served as a Teaching Assistant in applied flute at both FSU and PSU and is currently a Research Assistant in historical musicology and the director of the Collegium
Musicum ensembles at FSU. Her primary flute teachers and life mentors are Eva Amsler, Naomi
Seidman, and Eleanor D. Armstrong.
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