Performance Practice

Recently, musicologists have also debated how performance can be more meaningfully
addressed in historical discussions (Barolsky, et. al 2012), which echoes some points
raised a decade earlier by Olsen in his discussion of ethnoarchaeomusicology (2002).
It is interesting to note the inherent contradictions between this approach and that
advocated by Laurence Picken, who in describing his methods for analysis of Japanese
court music, wrote of deliberately ignoring the living tradition and performance
practice of today in order to focus exclusively on the contents of noted musical
manuscripts themselves (Widdess 1992, 221). Many musicologists are familiar with
the early music movement, a common label for musicians who attempt through
research to perform early music repertory from Europe, primarily from Medieval
and Baroque periods, in an historically informed manner. In order to achieve the lofty
goal of Historically Informed Performance (HIP), more often called period
performance today, one seeks to reconstruct the performance parameters that had
been lost or underwent extreme transformation throughout the centuries. For
example, performances using replicasor, occasionally original modelsof early
instruments to perform this repertory, which by their very construction, respond
differently from technologically improved modern instruments, have been thought
to possibly reveal the aesthetics of historical timbral production. There has been much
written on this topic and the movement is not without both criticism and praise (see
Morrow 1978, Dreyfus 1983, Kerman 1985, and Taruskin 1995, to name a few). The
point here is not to argue the merits, or lack thereof, to HIP, but rather to consider
these problems in light of the (re)construction of world music performance, now an
increasingly common occurrence in major university and college settings throughout
the world.

Ethnomusicologists, as Ted Sols notes, are Hopeful Antiorientalists in their

representation of others, but at the same time are almost always perceived as
speaking on behalf of the cultures we perform (Sols 2004, 10-11).
Solss Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music
Ensembles (2004) reveals the myriad of conflicting issues in creating world music
ensembles for performing ethnomusicologists. In ways that often resemble the early
music movement, ethnomusicologists venture to create ensembles that further the
educational goals of students, in spite of the challenges of teaching near beginners,
which is sometimes made all the more difficult because of frequent turnovers. Still, we
persist, and do so not necessarily with the unrealistic objective of perfectly replicating
authentic performance, but rather to create a meaningful and coherent performative
world that becomes a unique learning experience for students (Sols 2004, 17). In
representing the music of cultures we have spent our lifetime honing and
understanding, we all become bearers of historicity. Jonathan McCollum, for example,
teaches both a Japanese Music Ensemble and an Early Music Consort at Washington
College. McCollum performs at a high level on koto, is a recipient of the transmission
of both Koden and Koten Honkyoku on shakuhachi and was thus awarded the

accredited master name (natori) Kenzen (). Therefore, he feels capable of

transmitting a semblance of this tradition. Nevertheless, he is often painfully aware of

the lack of instructional time available to pass on the important historical cultural
information that his teachers, through over twenty years of study, imparted to him. The
turnover rate and varying interest among students require he reflect on realistic
pedagogical goals for the ensemble, a situation that resembles his Early Music Consort,
which performs music from Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Both the Japanese
Music Ensemble and the Early Music Consort offer similar challenges, such as teaching
new forms of notation, instructing students with little to no musical experience to
perform on an instrument (even at a beginner level), and teaching the historical
context necessary to understand the strikingly different aesthetics required of these
musics. Both examples, to be educationally relevant, are in fact, historically and
culturally informed.