Review

Reviewed Work(s): Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance by Richard Taruskin
Review by: Stan Godlovitch
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Summer, 1998), pp.
307-309
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/432372
Accessed: 01-11-2016 00:29 UTC

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Book Reviews
shipbuilding techniques that also involved a kind of
weaving. It is easy to think of the proportional simi-
larities between rows of oars moving in unison and
the lines of Doric columns.
The Greek temple, according to McEwen, symbol-
ized the "householder/citizen" of the Greek polis, its
obvious order reflecting the order of the well-made
city. In a related point, McEwen also contrasts the
well-ordered polis with the port, such as the
Athens/Piraeus juxtaposition, the latter as disharmo-
nious and ununified as the former aspires to being
well made. In Athens, McEwen claims, the mother
city (metropolis)Iport relationship was reversed: the
stable Athens having come to rely, through the prof-
its of colonization, upon the moving ships of the Pi-
raeus for its survival and growth-its stability.
McEwen's reading of these architectural begin-
nings is an attempt to draw a connection between the
remarkable lightness of the temple and its embodi-
ment of well-crafted kosmos. When explaining Vin-
cent Scully's observation that the Parthenon does in-
deed seem to take wing, McEwen says, "I strongly
suspect that the intention of their building was to de-
scribe the tension not so much of arrested movement
as of movement that is not yet." However, this re-
mark, which I take to be a serious conclusion of her
thesis, goes entirely unexplained. Its neglect leaves
one to speculate further about a move toward a divine
direction, a continuation of Greek colonization or a
general progress of kosmos over the unmolded ape-
iron. As a representation of the unity of craft and
community, McEwen does say, the temple replaced
the caves and sacred groves as spaces of divine
epiphanies, which I interpret as a "natural" to "artifi-
cial" step and again an emphasis on the civilized polis.
One of McEwen's final claims, that Socrates had
neither "understood or appreciated the artifact played
as the sensible vehicle and anchor for political kos-
mos," would surely have to be balanced by a recogni-
tion of the dozens of analogies between form and
craft throughout the dialogues, and by the signifi-
cance of the role of the demiourgos, or craftsman of
the Timaeus. Also, her somewhat surprising conclu-
sion, contained in her final sentence, that "not only
metaphysics but all of Western thinking was first
grounded in architecture," is entirely unsupported by
the strands of assumption in her book and would
seem to contradict her earlier thesis about the com-
mon "blood tie" with order. Even the somewhat
weaker thesis that Western thinking is grounded in
craft, even if craft were a necessary condition for
more abstract speculation, is not defended.
Still, I would heartily recommend this book-it ex-
tends the imagination regarding an already somewhat
familiar domain and it stimulates new thinking about
early craft, architecture, and ordered thought. What
McEwen does best is to draw broad-stroked connec-
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307
tions, based primarily on subtle etymological analy-
ses, in order to make connections among a network of
seemingly disparate domains. Sometimes these con-
nections are quite loosely drawn; at others they are
bound together well.
One more thing: Even the paperback version of this
MIT publication is beautifully designed and gener-
ously illustrated with wonderful, and highly relevant,
drawings and photographs. And this would be as
good an opportunity as any to say that MIT Press has
consistently published, what, in my opinion, have
been some of the most handsome books in aesthetics
and art history, especially in architecture, that are
available anywhere. This book is one of them.
DAVID GOLDBLATT
Department of Philosophy
Denison University
TARUSKIN, RICHARD. Text and Act: Essays on
Music and Performance. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1995, 382 pp., $14.95 paper.
Who now is the voice on earth of Bach, of Mozart, of
Josquin? Certainly not the doctrinaire purveyors of
authenticity in Early Music. "Why not simply recog-
nize our modern Bach for what he is, and stop the
nonsense about authenticity?" (p. 144)-and so a
telling taste from this lively and pugnacious pamphle-
teering collection which I recommend to anyone who
has thought about or developed a taste for historically
authentic performance. The collection falls into two
parts titled "In Theory" and "In Practice." Most items
were published between 1986 and 1991. I will focus
here upon "In Theory" although Taruskin wisely
never lets us conspire to isolate that from practice.
Because the pieces interweave and overlap, they are
treated below as the unit they constitute.
Although largely leveled against prominent fac-
tions in the Early Music movement, Taruskin's invec-
tives trace the ailment of practice purism to a general
drift in twentieth-century music toward "dehuman-
ized, geometricized art" (p. 136). The backroom bad
guys turn out to be those modernists who have domi-
nated current taste in classical music performance
for nearly a century. Among the evil demons are
Toscanini, Stravinsky, and Satie with their tireless
campaigns respectively for text-centered literalism,
impersonality, and lightness (p. 167), and their rejec-
tion of any romantic and Teutonic musical aesthetic
which encourages high expressiveness, gravity, spon-
taneity, and invention. Latterly muscling in on the au-
thority is the scholar, "Papa Doc, the musicologist"
(p. 187), epitomized in the "positivistic historicism"
(p. 146) and "destructive authoritarianism" (p. 147)
308
of Arthur Mendel, the Princeton musicologist. As one
amongst the "happy-go-lucky postmoderns" (p. 183),
Taruskin identifies early-music "performance prac-
tice authoritarians" (p. 65) as ideologically heir to
and typical of a pervasive twentieth-century posi-
tivistic and modernist persuasion, one which is hos-
tile to the "decentered musical polity" (p. 193) he de-
fends. So what is the fuss? The fuss is about the fact
that so-called historically authentic performance is
neither historical nor authentic (i.e., faithful recon-
struction), but is just the expression of a contempo-
rary musical aesthetic, one reflecting purely twenti-
eth-century tastes and (thus) liable to inhibiting
musical inventiveness and individuality. "What Early
Music has been doing is busily remaking the music of
the past in the image of the present, ... only calling the
present by some other name" (p. 169).
Taruskin disputes not only the historical ambitions
of the reconstructionists, but their very program,
namely, to present early music properly, to recreate it,
as it was originally intended by the composer for its
time and place and as it must have sounded to its first
audiences. "Historical reconstruction is just another
variety of interpretive excess" (p. 59) because "there
is no unmediated access to the past. All 'pasts' are
constructed in the present" (p. 218).
Taruskin's sustained critique of what he terms "au-
thenticism" operates along at least five fronts. Re-
garding epistemological matters, Taruskin points out
the extreme fallibility in reconstructive efforts con-
cerning what counts as the definitive musical texts.
"Editing is interpretation. Period" (p. 85). Com-
posers' intentions too are elusive and often change
regarding one and the same piece, e.g., Marais's
changes of heart (p. 71). We just do not and cannot
know well enough exactly what went on to allow our
speculative sketches to dominate performance choices.
Some composers, he notes, discover what their in-
tentions were after hearing musicians perform their
pieces. Further, "adherents to [authenticism] have
no unique claim in the matter of fidelity to the com-
poser's intentions. Everyone claims it" (p. 98).
Worse, even where the composer's wishes-Pro-
kofiev, Debussy-have been captured for all to hear,
they may be completely ignored and even condemned
(pp. 188-189).
The ontological dimension involves musical works.
In aiming to get to some pristine entity, musicological
attention turns to identifying the authoritative origi-
nal, which, when distilled as a score, becomes reified
and then sanctified ("text-fetishism" [p. 187]), em-
balmed in its barest essentials. In an ironic positivis-
tic turn, by becoming thus isolated the text-based
work becomes ahistorical, a museum piece fashioned
by its curators. Its only acknowledged properties
must be empirically verifiable, i.e., shorn of all un-
documented and undocumentable vagaries.
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
For Taruskin, ethical issues arise about musicians
being true to themselves. By submitting slavishly
(p. 129) to the Work and to the intentions of the dead
(both mummified by the musicologist), the performer
thereby abandons expressive responsibility. This cre-
ates "a crisis of sincerity" which takes the form of not
"speaking truly and in one's own voice" (p. 135).
"The appeal to intentions is an evasion of the per-
former's obligation to understand what he is perform-
ing" (p. 98).
If players are not always true to themselves, they
may not be entirely to blame. There is a broader po-
litical side, reflecting not only the power of the schol-
ars to dictate the authoritative texts and techniques to
be addressed, but also to bully performers, to give
them "a 'bad conscience"' (p. 147) about what they
should properly be doing. This climate of authoritar-
ian rule leads to the kind of revisionism that makes
one conductor trim all the richness (referred to by the
conductor as "fat" and "indulgence") in Brahms's Re-
quiem in the name of authenticity. This gives us "not
a historically correct performance but a politically
correct performance" (p. 174).
The ideology driving historical reconstruction con-
cerns Taruskin greatly. Modernist scholasticism be-
speaks "our impersonal, nay antipersonal, times"
(p. 162). In their expurgation of romanticism, mod-
ernists favor precision, uniformity, and external
answers to performance questions. "Vitalist perfor-
mance" is scorned (p. 130). "Elitism, purism, insis-
tence on scrupulous realization" (p. 132) triumph over
subjective choice and invention. "Verisimilitude" and
"depersonalization" displace "human content" and
expressiveness (p. 136). These are age-old themes re-
bottled many times over. For what more (and no less)
have we here than the battles between Apollo and
Dionysus, the classical and the romantic, reason and
passion, objectivity and subjectivity, beauty and the
sublime, order and flux, enlightenment and mysti-
cism, logic and intuition, mind and heart, authority
and freedom, law and will, mechanism and human-
ism (to which Taruskin would add: text and act), ...
and so on? What the Apollonian forfeits is "tradition
as hermeneuts conceive it: cumulative, multiply au-
thored, open, accommodating, above all messy, and
therefore human" (p. 192).
Following suit with those anthropologists who,
ages ago, began to suspect that culture and tradition
are constructed and not found, Taruskin demands
that the authenticists face their own mere preferences
and acknowledge that "what we call historical perfor-
mance is the sound of now, not then," that its authen-
ticity derives not from historical verisimilitude "but
from its being for better or worse a true mirror of late -
twentieth-century taste" (p. 166). He insists that many
of us like the "lean cuisine recipe" (p. 174) of mod-
ern early music performance-its brightness, brisk-
Book Reviews 309

ness, "fleet coolness," clarity, energy, lightness, and First"-largely a tit-for-tat gripe session against de-
tractors-and dive directly into Taruskin's ever-
sparseness. All of this is just fine, so long as we ac-
cept it as our own way of wanting our music to sound. brisk, ever-energetic slug-fest against authenticist
In this more reflective regard, the early music move- bullies, first staged in 1981 at the American Musico-
ment "as a symptomatically modern phenomenon ... logical Society and reproduced here as "On Letting
is not historical but it is authentic" (p. 175). the Music Speak for Itself."
Well, what, besides honesty and self-awareness, One last quote (my favorite, not least because it
does Taruskin want? Appearances aside, he values seems the whole truth): "Some writers, myself among
greatly the work done in the name of historically au- them, have proposed that talk of authenticity might
thentic performance, but not for the reasons authenti- better be left to moral philosophers, textual critics,
cists offer. Such performances, at their sincere best, and luthiers" (p. 92). Questions about which woods to
give us ourselves, express our tastes, as do any per- use or how thinly to scrape down lute ribs always
formances that flow uninhibitedly from a living tra- seemed so much clearer than those about whether to
dition of music making. Taruskin awaits with some play the Renaissance lute near the bridge or the rose.
joy the ongoing evolution of early music practice, and Taruskin has sorted me out on this one.
is quite sure that, so long as it is not constrained from
without by the ideologues, pedants, and curators, it STAN GODLOVITCH
will grow into as richly heterogeneous a musical en- Human & Leisure Sciences
terprise as any we know. It will thus deepen our de- Lincoln University
veloping musical tradition, not least for its offering
New Zealand
yet more options for expressive invention, novelty,
and experiment. Scholarship is to be the servant of
performers ("Let us accept from the scholar in us
only that which genuinely excites the performer in DANTO, ARTHUR C. After the End of Art: Con-
us" [p. 62]), and the "positivistic purgatory, literalis- temporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton
tic and dehumanizing, a thing of taboos and shalt- University Press, 1997, 239 pp., 18 b&w illus.,
nots" (p. 76) shall be cast from our midst. $24.95 cloth.
Of course, this all sounds rousingly-however un-
helpfully-romantic, and so it is. But who, really, Art has ended. There is still an enormous amount of
would want to pooh-pooh the virtues of musicianship art being produced. Anything at all can count as art.
Taruskin defends, all of which seem in their own right A definition of "art" in terms of necessary and suffi-
perfectly admirable personal virtues, e.g., conviction, cient conditions exists. In art everything is possible.
sincerity, responsiveness, imagination, communica- In art not everything is possible.
tion of delight, sharing of emotion, curiosity, open- Only someone with the combined skills and knowl-
mindedness, love of experiment, and more? And who, edge of a "star" in the history, criticism, and philoso-
really, can comfortably dismiss his generous liberal phy of art would attempt to make and reconcile the
pluralism, especially when you contemplate the al- above set of assertions. But Arthur C. Danto is such a
most invariably nastier alternatives? Dogmatic pushi- star, and in this volume of essays he tells a story that
ness just wrecks invention. Accept, as he invites, that makes all of them, singly and together, plausible.
"all times and places, past and present, are ideologi- Along the way he provides insight into the work of
cally heterogeneous" (p. 131), and, blessedly, one artists as diverse as Rembrandt van Rijn and Robert
may be spared the sheer craziness of educated adults Ryman.
savagely sniping at each other about-of all things- Most of the book is devoted to explaining how it is
how to play a piece of old music! The job of players, possible both for art to have ended and not ended, and
Taruskin reminds us, is not to play it the way it really what the consequences are for an artworld (ours) in
was. "Their job is to discover, if they are lucky, how which this is the case. The consistency of the appar-
we really like it" (p. 148). To what a pretty pass we ently contradictory statements 1) art has ended, and
must have come that not only does this need publish- 2) there is still a lot of art being made or done, relies,
ing, but that it is said in a climate of controversy. as one might expect, on a kind of trick. When Danto
I enjoyed these pieces. I enjoyed their passion, their discusses the "end of art," what he really discusses is
lightness, their humor, their conviction, and-as they the end of art history of a certain kind. Art, under-
grew on me-their author. There are some issues to stood in a particular way, he argues-using a phrase
which I take exception, but these papers were never of Hegel's-has fallen outside "the pale of history."
meant as solemn, cautious contributions to aesthetics. Hans Belting, Danto explains, has discussed art be-
They are diatribes, and nicely done for their purpose. fore the pale of history-art, that is, that falls outside
One small bit of advice: For maximum reading plea- the extension of the concept that developed in the
sure, skip the lengthy preamble, "Last Thoughts West around 1400 A.D. This was art made and done

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