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The Glyndebourne Phoenix
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16624 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1989 |
2,262 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
There is a kind of subtext in much of today's approach to musical classics that attempts to intuit music from other centuries as a quasi-divine escape hatch that will bring us into a more peaceful age of sound and shelter us from the fury to which our contemporary ears are subjected. The catchword for this sympathetically magic approach is authenticity.
According to The Economist, authenticity has become something of a modern obsession, encompassing not only performances of "older" music, but also extending to the work of composers as late as Igor Stravinsky and, heaven help us, George Gershwin. On the face of it, this preoccupation is even more irrational than the usual influence of fashion in the arts--a twentieth-century chapter for the Charles Mackay classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Musical sound is not a phenomenon that exists in a vacuum, either physically or culturally. An attempt to capture the "original sound" of, say, Josquin De Prez, or Ockeghem, or of a composer we think we know well, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, would of course involve not just the notes and orchestration of the work but actual penetration of the very aural experience and context of the composer himself and his audience. This would need much more than a simple reconstruction of old instruments, concert halls, and orchestral or other setups. It would require a feat that no one has yet been able to manage successfully, in other words, the building of a time machine.
Twentieth-Century Lust
Obviously the "authentic" or "original"
... (1997 of 13533 Characters)
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