TREITLER, History and Music

History and Music
Author(s): Leo Treitler

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 21, No. 2, History and... (Winter, 1990), pp. 299-319
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469254
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History and Music
Leo Treitler
SWILL HAVE two main topics: (1) Thinking about music historically,
and (2) the relations between history and the composition and
performance of music. Both topics entail the effort to work out
something about the tricky relationship between past and present,
in our understanding and in the way things happen.
Thinking about music historically is a task that we are currently
concerned with in the field of musicology, as we try to wrestle
ourselves free of some historiographical dogmas by which the field
has been constrained since its beginnings early in this century. A
principal condition of that task, from which perhaps all the other
aspects follow, will be the presence of music in the historian's con-
sciousness. For the central premise of historical and even of critical
studies in music has been the exclusion of music from the historian's
consciousness. Music has been out there, and bringing it in will
mean a reversal of styles of knowing and telling, from an episte-
mology based on the distance of the knower from the known, to
one based on the interaction of the two. That's asking a lot, and
it brings up the question encased in a famous punch line: "What
you mean, 'we . . .'? " I shall want to say something about who is
"we," about why it's asking a lot-a question that will lead me to
some reflections about the conditions of knowing in our culture-
and about factors in the visible field of musical studies that can
help to move us toward such a reversal.
I shall begin at the end of this agenda and address one of
questions that our host, Michael Roth, has put to me in a very go
list, a question that I must address in order to identify myself a
my field to you: "Can we translate some of the critical style
use with texts for use with scores?" That is, can we expect
from the theory and metatheory of literary criticism?
Musicology has always been a parasitic discipline of sorts,
pendent from the beginning on art history for its historiogr
paradigms and on literary studies for its paleographic and ph
logical principles. That is ironic, considering how much the o
arts have aspired to be music, or claimed to be music, throug
300 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
history. Our borrowing fro

get us going, but it has tende
of the three fields, the mo
quickly with a problem in m
for the entire field because
studies have played in the d
beginning musicologists have
ciples of text criticism and s
cloth from classical philology
discussion about how the g
when music still circulated in
the generation of a canonical
of many centuries behind i
highly questionable.
We have not yet aired the
to composition, transmission
our parasitic habits, we cou
Stanley Fish, in one direction
I hope that we will not, bec
informed by an awareness of
to do so we would again be
on a ready-made methodology
experience and in reflection
the problems that we have to
to Professor Roth's question
On the whole it is a little di
vocabulary of this conferenc
be for any musicologist. In
illustrate, the synchronic is
almost exclusively viewed in
and functionalism are wor
literature (although you will
the title The Structural Func
enjoyed deconstructionism's p
ness. Anglophone musicolog
tioned the significance or w
one in the field has yet spo
propose in the final section
recent development in mus
sense. (In Germany the stor
raised in the sixties, the field
sailed on down, or up, the m
been characteristic of this ver
HISTORY AND MUSIC 301
limbs, or they separate

a Society for Ethnomusi
representing subdisciplin
leanings.)
That provides a short answer to another of Professor Roth's
questions: Is historical thinking for the musicologist more akin to
that of the anthropologist or the art historian? The short answer
is that musicologists who think like anthropologists generally function
as ethnomusicologists. Historical musicology has traditionally been
conducted on the model of art history. But this question is like
being asked to triangulate three moving images; I see all three
disciplines as being in some sort of dance together in which each
approaches the others. But it isn't possible to tell whether they will
meet.
If I am catching the drifts of change in anthropology

there are similar currents in musicology: the tendency
younger scholars to abandon their distant and omniscien
vis-a-vis their objects and to take their experience of m
point of departure for historical knowing; and to recogn
is representations of their objects that they are writing, no
on them. What is entailed is a gamble on letting the sch
back into the game. I say this with all due caution, for it
an exaggeration for me to characterize the present state
cology in this way. And there is the grumbling of disap
be heard from among the guardians of the profession (most
the president of the American Musicological Society, wor
cathedra about the "reliance on ephemeral and subjectiv
formulations to describe musical contents").2
As for art history, I've already said that we borrowed o
historiographical paradigms from that discipline. But the "r
ism" that I hear about there, under the dual influences of M
on one side, and feminism on the other, has no parallel i
phone musicology.
I am going to take the liberty of quoting myself as anoth
of trying to circle around this question--from a contrib
publication on Musicology in the 80's that was published in
need to depart freely and imaginatively from traditional ca
evolutionary models of historical discourse toward "a her
sense, in which [music] is viewed as a meaningful item
wider context of practices, conventions, assumptions, transm
receptions, social relations-in short, a musical culture, whic
to endow its constituent aspects with meaning while atta
own meaning from the combination of its constituents."
Andantino
i f V do IceI
ffO if F; F
pip +? 'f
Fig. 1 Chopin
think that such an attitude constitutes an accommodation with recent

thought in both of those other fields.
Those of us who work with medieval sources-and with an open
mind-understand that our interests provoke some aspects of a
deconstructionist stance, and that the questions that are raised by
our sources about textuality probably ought to be raised about music
on a much broader front. Whether that will happen remains to be
seen. But on the whole these winds have mainly blown over the
heads of musicologists, the old historicism has not blown away, and
there is no talk of a new historicism. So the sense of crisis that
Professor Roth evokes in his letter is not in the present experie
of my field. But you will understand that I do not say this i
sense of "I'm all right, Jack." I say it, rather, with something o
bewilderment of an Eastern European immigrant arriving fo
first time in New York City.
But now let me put out another instance of the way that a prob
is focused from inside musical studies, provoking an approach
comes to look like a literary-critical style. Here is the score
very familiar little piece by Chopin (fig. 1). Not long ago the pre
of the Society for Music Theory gave a public account of this pi
by way of an analytical notation that has become the predom
mode of analysis in the U.S. for music from Bach to Brahm
is a leading paradigm in the field of music theory. As its m
characteristic it aims to display the "essential" structure of the
as a stepwise descent in the melody through the degrees of
lower segment of the scale of A major to A, the tonic, in conjunc
with a descent in the bass from the "dominant" tone E to the tonic
(see fig. 2). All surface details of the piece are interpreted as
elaborations of that structure and are subordinated to it. The ad-
c'%*=WO
/ bw
Fig. 2.
vantage that is claimed for such analyses is that they demonstrate

the coherence and organic unity of the work by virtue of the very
fact that they can present a synoptic view of it. That view is sometimes
compared to linear perspective. It is no small part of the affirmed
value of this type of analysis that it exemplifies a universal principle
of the musical language of the period from Bach to Brahms, namely
that all of it can be reduced to just such coordinated soprano-bass
descents to the tonic of whatever key a piece may be in, and that
all details of such music result from transformations, projections,
elaborations at successive levels of a resulting hierarchical structure.
The claimed value of this kind of analysis, then, is in its capacity
to produce generalized knowledge in the historical and theoretical
domains, knowledge which can therefore be regarded as objective.
But it can serve the historical domain only in a restricted sense, as
we shall see.
The conception of unity and coherence behind this method ca
be expressed something like this. The work of the artist is an
instantaneous creative act, and its product cannot but be unified by
the single impulse that informs every cell of it. That informs t
work concept. A work is conceived as a thing, not an event or
process. Things can be represented as structures and in representin
the structure we represent the thing. The musical thing or wo
can be represented by a score, or by an analytical notation th
amounts to a reduction of the score to its essential structure. We
have come by this conception in two historical stages: a shif
emphasis in the conception of what music is, from proces
structure, that we can recognize in the late Middle Ages;5 and
conception of work as architectonic structure, that we have had o
since the late nineteenth century. You will recognize the structural
center in this whole notion, but it is a structuralism that grew ou
of the history of musical thought, independently of Saussure
Levi-Strauss. It is significan
been highly developed for rep
a spatiality about them tha
whereas it has concerned itsel
that is the temporal dimens
in the sense of speech act) h
or in the work concept at al
equally disregarded, except
help to articulate pitch struct
Now the respondent to Be
Chopin's Prelude was presen
sketch is supposed to show th
does it not include the F# in mm. 13 and 14? For she claimed that
this note is an essential element in the expressive program of t
piece, as indeed it is. In itself it creates, with the bass, an expos
and unresolved dissonance. And in context it is involved in the
gathering extravagance of the sweep of the melody in the
half that determines the character of the piece as a whole. It
character that is an entrance to the understanding of the p
an item that participates in and contributes to the culture
manticism. The formalist analysis fails to provide such an ope
and its mode of approach has in fact been an obstacle to hi
understanding in musical studies altogether.
The orthodox response to the respondent's question wou
"Your question shows that you don't understand the nature
analysis, which is meant to reveal the structure against wh
F# sharp, or any other detail, becomes expressive." But th
terresponse would be, "But you didn't say so, in fact you w
be caught dead talking about the expressive or the beauti
music." (Perhaps you have caught that this exchange coul
translated into a colloquy about a poem: someone gives a synta
analysis of its sentences and represents that as an analysis
poem. Someone else says, "You haven't accounted for its e
siveness." The response is, "I have shown you the structure
system against whose background the poem can be expressive,
so on. The musical analysis I showed you has the status of
syntactical analysis that is presented as an account of the
And it is quite representative.) My belief is that we have n
to music as a historical item, we have no possibility of his
knowledge of music, unless we take account of its beauty,
pressiveness, its power to move people, in its time, in the pre
and in between.
But expressiveness functions in a historical context of meanin
Beethoven's Overture to
piece, begins with a dar
mosphere for the play's
us immediately. But th
meaning. In the rhythm o
EGMONT
OUVERTURE
Sostemato ma non t
Flauti _AMP__
Obol "
Clarinetti In
got -.ti
Cornl In ff.
Trombe In -_.
TImpant In [TDo
Sosenuto e m non troppo

Violino I
V iola." I !-49 ,iln II

Violoneello
Contrabasso
'r T P.?
Fig. 3.
dance genre called Sarabande,

movement of a Bach suite,
"Ah," we think, "the Spanish
in our understanding that in
Sarabande would have been identified as an archaism, like the
religiosity of the sudden reversion to something like a Palestrina
style in the midst of the reveries in the slow movement of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony. These momentary archaisms achieved through
the transformation of a conventional sign were relished as such,
and that itself is a Romantic phenomenon.
With this brief excursion into the historical-critical interpretation
of music behind us, we can appreciate how complex must be any
answer to the central question that Professor Roth has asked: "What
is the status of the object we are investigating when we do music
history? Is it a past performance, or a text presented to us in
notation or in contemporary performance?"
It is natural for someone trying to take a comparative view of
the intersection of history with the arts to ask this question. But in
fact during nearly the entire life of historical studies in music (that
is, since the turn of this century) it is the autonomous work that
has been the object of study, conceptualized as a structure that is
inferable from a score.6 The music-historical paradigm has been a
blend of style history--appropriated from art history-with the
attitude of the New Criticism toward the literary work.
It is within the confines of this paradigm that the mode of analysis
that I showed before has been functional. And it is in the security
of it that musicology was able to evade questions that have been
occupying students of the history of art and literature about the
presentness and pastness of its objects, and questions unique to
music about the relations among works, scores, the notational me-
dium, and performances. But these questions have lately been forcing
themselves upon us from within by investigations and activities that
begin as perfectly normal historical problems. Questions about the
presentness and pastness of our objects are raised in a new way by
the Historical Performance movement, about which I have already
promised to speak in the last section. Questions about works, scores,
notation, and performance have become newly activated through
our awareness that the medieval music culture, in which we locate
the roots of our Western tradition, lacked all the conditions that
have been for us the premises for the possibility of a history of
music: a transmission founded on the written score, a work concept,
the idea of musical structure, the idea that the musical work is
autonomous. Recognizing that these are not universals we are, in
effect, challenged to under

And that engages us in a
the history of learned mus
textuality and the work h
they spread to the presen
In reverse motion to su
from the past to the pre
conceptions we hold in th
put this problem in a nu
acterize a horse as a whe
conflict is not always a s
the old habits of historian
past, especially about the t
which that habit is associat
think of a score as a blue
upon scores from the ninth
the evaluation of the nota
fully developed. But for
were perfectly adequate gi
except at certain critical m
principles. We are in the
best are present practices
entry into the past. I am th
to mind by Malraux's rem
us to understand El Greco, it is modern art; and Eliot's notion that
what happens with the composition of a new poem happens to all
the poems composed before. That is something of what I mean
about the trickiness of the past-present relation. In historical un-
derstanding, past and present are like the two sides of a tennis
court. The object does not move once and for all from one side to
the other, it is volleyed back and forth. If it stops for a time in
one court, it is eventually picked up and sent back to the other-
unless it is lost, as sometimes happens (we have lost the music of
ancient Greece).
The questions about the status of the object of study--especially
with respect to scores and works-could have taken shape in con-
nection with one of the most heavily cultivated fields in musicology
today, the study of the sketches of composers; but they have not,
and it is instructive to consider why.
When it is said, for example, that a certain leaf contains a "sketch
for the second movement" of Beethoven's String Quartet opus 134
in C# minor, it is worth considering what is meant by that, and
what is the status of the notational markings on that page. The
statement is made with the f

although of course there wa
movement of Beethoven's
sketch was being produced
This tendency reflects a p
but it reflects, too, the hist
taken initially in the ninete
aesthetic idea-about the natu
type of investigation -wh
musicology and is one of t
in their search for disserta
of Beethoven, which were fa
with pedestrian ideas and t
at once show the essential ide
case is the beginning of th
opening statement by the
at a. Beethoven's sketch for
It is nearly identical to the
being the full close on the
conclusive pause on the d
structure is generally referr
The final version of the orc
a wholly different rhetoric,
ing in its own way-at once a
expressive, cantabile phrase
between the two characters
Under the aesthetic ideas
remember explaining it m
that leap is energized by th
exemplified the theory of c
the spontaneity and instanta
attributes to that character
presented, among others, b
itself is still generally know
a phrase that legitimates the
been invested in the study o
A different sort of expla
E. H. Gombrich's idea, in Art
The binary, symmetrical, ba
the first version is one of the transmitted schemata or norms of
the style. The fact that Beethoven wrote it down initially does n
necessarily mean that he actually contemplated at that moment t
the piece would go that way, any more than does the fact tha
a. . ; ,
Sole - d*eie ==N
drlm - T ]K F 1 0
..I .
r . i
E l ,*., ' I *
b.
C.
I. ii ;ta-11 1 "- ,- "PTA A

d------ 7~r 1"7
" - -.aim. -..... - 0 ,'mj" 3 .I m-'
X
.-.. A
-t %Nml _w11
id
' N,..ll
Fig. 4.
artist begins the drawing of

mean that he or she actual
head would look like an eg
The human mind forms im
that are more or less evanesc
at them, trying to catch t
phrases, figures that are mo
has been put down with the
seem right, thus changing t
of mutual accommodation ta
like a work. In the course of
not only through different
Taking the musical notati
habitual belief in the tight,
tween the notation and some
belongs to a powerful com
studies on a broad front: The
producing closed, fixed work
unity and originality by virt
and that are uniquely repr
a notation that unambiguou
work so that performers can
are compliant with them.
blueprint for the perform
but what the work is is not clear.
From this brief paragraph can be deduced virtually all of th
projects that have occupied musicologists and the conceptions by
which they are controlled. The example as a whole exhibits the
historicity of such concepts as a topic that demands a place in musi
historical studies.
I turn now to the relationship between history and the composition

of music in the present, which I would like to introduce with two
metaphors.
First: there is a composition by John Cage called Imaginary Land-
scapes #4 for twelve radios. Two performers sit at each radio, one
controlling the volume, the other the station dial. The score is
literally a blueprint for performance. There are bar lines and tempo
markings. Each performer has specific instructions concerning what
to do at each moment with the knob (or buttons) he or she controls--
louder or softer, higher or lower Kilohertz. The conductor is ad-
monished to be very strict. There is a story in circulation about a
performance in Town Hall, New York, in which one of the radios
WON"..,,,, lop
q4:-- -q..-
~ f~ 3P~-tic,
Fig. 5.
caught strains of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and someone in

the audience yelled, "Leave it on."
Nowadays you can turn on the radio and hear what sounds like
a Beethoven String Quartet, but you know the quartets and you
know it isn't one. The announcer tells you that you have just heard
a quartet by George Rochberg, once a serialist composer. Another
time you might hear what you think is a waltz by Johann Strauss,
but the announcer tells you it is by a young Polish composer named
Kotkowicz, who had previously been working in Cologne in the
studio of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Yet another time you might hear
what you think is a newly discovered tone poem by Richard Strauss,
but it turns out to be by David del Tredici. The morning of this
writing I read through a sonata for cello and piano composed in
1987 by Easly Blackwood, which sounded as though it had been
composed by Frank Bridge, the teacher of Benjamin Britten. It is
a common phenomenon in art music since the 1970s (historians
and critics usually fail to notice that it happened earlier in pop
music-for example, the Beatles' "White Album," Janis Joplin doing
Bessie Smith).
There are all sorts of labels for this. Rochberg speaks of "a music
of remembering." Most commonly it is called "New Romanticism."
I don't much care about labels as such, but I worry about the focus
on "Romanticism," for it leaves out other familiar stuff you might
hear if you switch on the radio. For example, I would like to
persuade you that so-called "minimalist" music has an aspect that
could suggest the label "Stretched Neo-Baroque music." (Peter
Schickele demonstrated this recently with a newly discovered opera
by P. D. Q. Bach called Einstein on the Fritz, based on the first
Prelude of the First Book of J. S. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier [fig.
5]).
I would like to call this phenomenon "Radio Music," and in doing
so I think of the radio as a ki

things are presented. Or pe
The second metaphor: the Ne
21, 1988 carried an article a
had falsified dates for some
(those polytonal, polytextural
he is known), evidently to cr
the modernist innovations o
Ives was preoccupied with m
respect to its gender charac
delssohn, early Beethoven, H
and Massanet was for him "
"too much sugar plum for th
of [Chopin] as wearing a ski
sensuousness." Sibelius's music
that had never had an idea.
Elgar, on the other hand, i
own music, together with
masculine."
"Masculine," for Ives, was identified with "rational." "The genius,"
he said, must exercise that "self restraint which can control the
emotional . . . impulses" (like Reason, the charioteer in Plato's myth
in the Phaedrus, who struggles to control the twin steeds of Passion
and Desire). Sensuality is associated with the loss of masculine
identity. It seems that Ives's "modernism" came about as a way of
covering over the "atmospheric, lyrical, yielding" character of his
first ideas.10
In fact, "modernism," so far as the history of music in the twentieth
century is concerned, has always been associated with rationality
and control, and with an ambivalence about sensuality and emo-
tionalism, which could run to extremes in both directions. Therein
it displays, despite its new means, an ancient polarity of thought
and feeling in Western culture. Ives's manifestation of it sets in the
foreground the gender associations that are always in the background
of that polarity. To the extent that rationality was given priority, it
was associated with a claim for objectivity and for its own historical
necessity. There is a famous story about Arnold Schoenberg's being
introduced to an army doctor in the First World War. The doctor
said, "Not the Arnold Schoenberg!" and Schoenberg answered,
"Someone had to be, so I volunteered." This quintessential Hegelian
bon mot reflects Schoenberg's deep conviction that he carried the
future of German music on his shoulders. But the general idea of
the necessity of the progress of advanced music as a premise of
the continuation of a mus

of modernism from the
heard through the 1960s
it is exactly parallel wit
historians, from the outside, of modern music, and of music in
general.
Saying it, in this case, made it so. To a degree that was rarely
matched in the history of Western music, the composition of the
music rode in tandem with a theory that deliberately forged ahead,
mainly articulated by the composers themselves, and was as ration-
alistic as the analytical theory that I described in connection with
the Chopin Prelude.
There is a characterization of musicology by Nino Pirrotta, an
octogenarian Sicilian who is the most graceful writer in English in
the field, that captures the spirit, not only of musicology, but as
well of musical composition and theory during the period of mod-
ernism that coincided with the formative years of musicology:
Musicology is a recent word . . one many people are not too happy with.
It is modeled, as others are, after the old and glorious name of philology.
But whoever invented the older name set the accent on love-love of beauty
in speech; every subsequent derivation has emphasized instead the logos
component, with inelegant verbosity and, in the name of objectivity, with
a detached, almost aggressive attitude toward its purported subject. Lovely
and loving Philology was deemed by a poet the worthy bride of Mercury;
I can think of Musicology only as a maiden, whose secret love for no lesser
deity than Apollo will never have a chance until she gets rid of her heavy
glasses, technical jargon, and businesslike approach and assumes a gentler,
more humanistic manner."
I read the splitting of the word "philology" as a metaphor fo

the consciousness divided between reason and sensibility, unde
which modernism increasingly ran its course. Ives was a casualty of
this deeply rooted cultural condition of knowing.
As tightly as musical modernism was locked in with history,
the phenomenon of "radio music" shows a new liberation of musica
composition from the imperatives of a driving historicism. In that
sense it is postmodernism in music. There is a parable of this histo
composed by Kafka in 1920, which Hannah Arendt cited in he
book Between Past and Future. It is called "HE."
He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origi
The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sur
the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push
him forward, and in the same

with the first,
h since he drives
it is not only the two antagoni
and who really knows his intent
in an unguarded moment-and
any night has ever been yet-he w
promoted, on account of his ex
umpire over his antagonists in th
This new freedom is admir

of piano pieces by William B
(1979), that we may take as
kind of representation, and r
voice is heard against the ba
as both principal player and
and haunted by ghosts of di
him.
Just at this point in the w
reveries about the concept of
almost the minute it was utter
about how on the mark it is
of making something one's ow
in direction of the concept o
seem to belong to a discour
do-except, perhaps, for the
off," which was uttered with
about the appropriation of
then I wondered, is it really
about here, or a matter of "tradition and the individual talent,"'4
a sense of the whole available history of music as an order that is
reordered with each new work of note? An irony about "radio
music" is that, despite its flirtations with the musical past, it represents
a relief, a relaxation of modernism's drive to continue the line from
Beethoven, to keep musical progress at that intensity, to compete
with Beethoven, in effect. As long as that drive was under way it
was impossible to continue using Beethoven's sounds and his musical
grammar and aesthetic. Numerous composers said as much early
in the century. Once that tension snapped, once the ambition was
given up, composers could give up their scruples against engaging
the past, without feeling threatened. But this is an irony only from
the vantage point of history regarded as an orthogenic procession.
My discomfort with the list of "isms" that is on the agenda of
this conference is just with the way that they imply a notion of the
history of thought about art also as a procession, one that, like the
other, ends up being circ

its premises. If we could
advancing central point
and more in accordance
yet fully successful-to re
properties of groups to
the present would not s
Still, there is a kind of
of music. It is sui gener
itself, which it offers t
phenomenon of "histori
nounced as my last subj
The investigations and
curate performance be
"authenticity" in the
increasingly--his predec
marks because, while it
were regarded as self-e
increasingly questioned
major shift in the epist
premise of the authenti
omous work as I have described it. Within the boundaries of the
"work" construct there was assumed to be enfolded a perform
that would be as authentic as the "correct" text of the work, and
that would be established by scholarly methods, just as would the
text itself. The authentic performance and text would represent the
authoritative work-taking "authoritative" in the literal sense deriv-
ing from "authorial." In the context of this tradition, as in others,
the word "historical" gave off a penumbra of "authoritative" and
"authentic." To claim that something was "historical" was to claim
also that it was "authentic" and "authoritative." Once that claim was
established, especially with the support of the claim that it wa
established by "objective" means, there could be no arguing with
it. (As it turned out the sharpest arguments were staged betwee
those who made just such claims.) Through an astonishingly rapi
historical development that cannot be sketched in detail here, th
situation has been radically transformed.'6 One factor in that histor
should be mentioned: the spread of the historical performance
movement over an ever wider domain in both directions, resultin
in its encounter on the earlier side with traditions for which the
work concept was increasingly questionable, and on the later s
with traditions that have a continuity to the present-the Ma
tradition of John Philip Sousa, for example. But it must be r
ognized, too, that the transf

conscious and deliberate on
The best and briefest way
transformation has been is to
those earlier ones, and in doi
two of whom are also partici
fus, and Richard Taruskin (
and conductors of early mu
Historical performance, or
Music," is no longer an anti
but a reconstruction of th
"enabling a new and hither
"blend of old and new," "
sensibility upon the past."18
of the performer-historian fa
objects. "Early Music signifie
things . . . [It is] a late twen
tices.""1 As Verdi wrote "It's f
better to create it," so Taruskin writes "It's fine to assemble the
shards of a lost performance tradition, but how much better to
reinvent it."20
The radical shift of focus, from the objects of Early Music to the
agents in the process of making it in the present, shows the ideal
of "authenticity" to be, not so much false for lack of good and
sufficient evidence, but meaningless for its dependence on the
maintenance of a strict separation between subject and object. The
stubborn insistence on that separation does not survive a dedicated
performance practice that has its own authenticity, now in the sense
of conviction, of genuineness, of presentness (in the sense of both
"here" and "now"), of a lack of falseness or ostensibleness, the sense
in which a "Three Choirs Festival" performance of Messiah may be
more authentic than an "historical reconstructionist" one."2 This has
implications for a different sense of history than the authoritative
sense associated with the earlier sense of "authentic."
But why specifically Early Music, why not musical performan
altogether? Because Early Music, freed of the burden of "auth
ticity," nevertheless confronts its text in view of its historicity. T
very ambiguity of the designation itself is apt: it points to t
historicity of both text and interpreter. The Mozart performance
of Bruno Walter were concretizations of an Apollonian Mozart ima
that was widely held in Walter's culture-by scholars as well a
performers. The Bach performances of Stokowski, like the one
Disney's Fantasia, were concretizations of a monumental Bach imag
that was likewise widely

history and its own histor
sciousness of its historicity
from among other optio
performances reflected th
such performance tradit
concept; the concept of
bridge between subject and
violating the hard bounda
terpretation" concept shiel
from its inevitable expos
ceptual reorientation, th
Performance movement in
first of all with respect to
In the end, Dreyfus refe
epistemology of hermene
confronting a text, as th
interpreter moves betwe
toration of meaning from
and at the other for a cr
the interpreter's own herm
fication of the text. It is
two stances, but of recogni
from both stances, which
text is granted authority an
At the other pole we critic
seems to say, in what con
whose attention it is writ
what reasoning habits. In
authority and we stage th
though we were its autho
we had uttered those wor
with whom we are in con
we ask, in a very broad s
But how does one criticize
musical texts are evasive, t
thing you need to know
always have told the people
they needed to know.) In
texts tell about nothing bu
figures are grouped with
about voice production and
The texts of the masterpie
are sufficiently evasive so

performance in two differe
phonies are sufficiently evas
of the same andante with t
other hand, all musical texts
quickest way that I can thi
to the sorts of transcriptio
buy for home use. If you p
and unlike what you hear
tradition. It is easy to over
always has been to capture s
expect and assume that the s
so. But they might instead
in trying to approximate th
tities and histories that run
which they refer, without b
because they evade and dis
supposed to depict the same
can distort and evade in
medieval and sixteenth-cen
operas by Handel and Verd
Bach and the texts of maz
Bruckner. So we must put
mystifying stance vis-a-vis
texts or, indeed, paintings
questions arise. We must ask
is a question of history.
There is something satisfyi
that a living performance
enlightened and enlighteni
music and history. Virtually
historical performance has it
music which, too, must hav
senses of that word.
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
NOTES
1 See Arnold Schoenberg, The Structural Functions of Harmony (New

2 Lewis Lockwood, Presidential Address to the American Musicolog
New Orleans 1987, College Music Society Symposium, 28 (1988), pp. 1-9
3 Leo Treitler, "Structural and Critical Analysis," in Musicology in th
Kern Holoman and Claude V. Palisca (New York, 1982), p. 69.
4 See Wallace Berry, "Sense

in Fact and Value in Contempo
5 In the time of the oral tra
only as process, not as work
6 Carl Dahlhaus, the most pr
written in his Foundations of
and not 'event' is the corner
terms, the material of music
poiesis, the creation of form
one domain of music history,
7 See Benedetto Croce, Estetica
1902).
8 See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, 1960).
9 See Donal Henahan, "Did Charles Ives Fiddle with the Truth?" New York Times,
21 Feb. 1988, sec. 2, pp. 1, 25. The story was based on Maynard Solomon's article
"Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity," Journal of the American Musicological Society,
40 (1987), 443-70.
10 Solomon, p. 467.
11 Nino Pirrotta, "Ars Nova and Stil Novo," in Music and Culture in Italy from the
Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 26.
12 Franz Kafka, " 'He': Notes from the Year 1920," in The Great Wall of China, tr.
Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, 1946); cited in Hannah Arendt, Between Past and
Future (New York, 1968), p. 7.
13 William Bolcom, "Three Ghost Rags for Piano," in Paul Jacobs, Paul Jacobs Plays
Blues, Ballads, and Rags, Nonesuch Records, 79006, 1979.
14 I refer here to T. S. Eliot's essay with that title, published, among other places,
in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York, 1975).
15 See the chapter "What Kind of Story is History?" in my Music and the Historical
Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
16 The story is well told by Joseph Kerman in Contemplating Music (Cambridge,
Mass., 1985). See also my essay "The Power of Positivist Thinking," Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 375-402.
17 Laurence Dreyfus, "Early Music Defended Against its Devotees: A Theory of
Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century," The Musical Quarterly, 69 (1983),
304.
18 Kerman, p. 200.
19 Dreyfus, p. 298.
20 Richard Taruskin, "On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on
Musicology and Performance," The Journal of Musicology, 1 (1982), 343.
21 Taruskin, p. 343.

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History and Music

Author(s): Leo Treitler

history. Our borrowing fro

limbs, or they separate

If I am catching the drifts of change in anthropology

think that such an attitude constitutes an accommodation with recent

vantage that is claimed for such analyses is that they demonstrate

Sosenuto e m non troppo

V iola." I !-49 ,iln II

dance genre called Sarabande,

effect, challenged to under

statement is made with the f

I. ii ;ta-11 1 "- ,- "PTA A

artist begins the drawing of

I turn now to the relationship between history and the composition

caught strains of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and someone in

so I think of the radio as a ki

the continuation of a mus

I read the splitting of the word "philology" as a metaphor fo

him forward, and in the same

This new freedom is admir

other, ends up being circ

ognized, too, that the transf

that was likewise widely

are sufficiently evasive so

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

1 See Arnold Schoenberg, The Structural Functions of Harmony (New

4 See Wallace Berry, "Sense

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