performing works of music authentically

Performing Works of Music Authentically

Julian Dodd

Abstract: This paper argues that, within the Western ‘classical’ tradition ofperforming works of music, there exists a performance value of authenticity thatis distinct from that of complying with the instructions encoded in the work’sscore. This kind of authenticity—interpretive authenticity—is a matter of a per-formance’s displaying an understanding of the performed work. In the course ofexplaining the nature of this norm, two further claims are defended: that therespective values of interpretive authenticity and score compliance can come intoconflict; and that when this happens, compromising ideal score compliance forthe sake of making the performance more interpretively authentic can make fora better performance.

1.

Take a work of Western, ‘classical’ music, W. What makes a performance of Wa good performance of W? In asking this question we set ourselves the task ofascertaining which features are genuine performance values within our practiceof performing such works of music.1 My claim in this paper is that an importantsuch performance value is a variety of authenticity that has tended to beoverlooked by philosophers of music. But before I get on to this, a couple ofpreliminary points need to be made.

First, in asking what makes for a good performance of W, we are concernedwith the evaluation of performances as performances of W, and not as autono-mous, unclassified musical events (Levinson 1987: 377). Second, we must be clearabout what it is for something to be a performance value. Following StephenDavies, my suggestion is this: a property, F-ness, is a performance value withinthe tradition of work performance that concerns us just in case a performance ofany work of that tradition is better for being more F, other things being equal(Davies 1987: 47).2

Having cleared the ground in this way, let us start to think about the idea ofauthenticity in performance. At its most abstract, for e to be an authenticperformance of W, e must true to W—that is, faithful to W—in some way. Onefairly obvious way in which e might be true to W is by accurately rendering W’sscore into sound. This variety of authenticity I call score compliance authenticity,3

and I accept the unremarkable thesis that such authenticity is a performancevalue within the Western, classical tradition. However, it is my contention thatthere is another variety of authenticity that is a performance value for us. Inthis paper I aim to do two things: spell out the nature of this latter kind ofauthenticity; and then show that there can be cases in which a performance is

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DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00546.x

European Journal of Philosophy ••:•• ISSN 0966-8373 pp. ••–•• © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

better for having sacrificed a level of score compliance for the sake of being moreauthentic in this second way. We shall see that in situations in which the twoforms of authenticity cannot be jointly maximized, the right interpretive optioncan sometimes be that of departing from certain scored instructions in order toattain greater authenticity of this other kind.

In outline, my proposal is this. There is a way in which e can be faithful toW in performance that consists in e’s displaying understanding of W: that is, ine’s interpreting W in a perceptive or insightful way. This performance value I callinterpretive authenticity. In Sections 2 and 3 I elaborate the idea of interpretiveauthenticity, contrasting it more thoroughly with score compliance authenticity.In Section 4 I observe that interpretive authenticity is a central performancevalue within our practice of performing and listening to works of music. And itis this fact, I argue, that explains why, when the claims of score compliance andinterpretive authenticity conflict, as they might, exchanging full score compliancefor greater interpretive authenticity can make for a better performance. Thislatter thesis is, of course, controversial, bringing me into direct conflict withthose I call score compliance hard-liners: philosophers, such as Davies, who regardscore compliance authenticity as a performance value that is ‘not negotiable inthe way that other performance values may be’ (Davies 2001: 241). So, finally, inSections 5 and 6 I defend my position against the kinds of consideration broughtto bear by Davies.

2.

As noted in Section 1, a performance of W is more authentic the more faithfulit is to W in some way or other. Recent work in the philosophy of music tendsto elaborate this kind of authenticity in one direction only: towards what I haveintroduced as score compliance authenticity. According to this latter notion, asexplicated crisply by Davies, performing W authentically is a matter of ‘render-ing the score faithfully’ (Davies 1988: 223). On this view, e is more faithful to Wthe more e complies with the ‘work-determinative instructions’ publiclyexpressed by the composer in W’s score (Davies 2001: 207).4 Typically, but notalways (Goehr 2007: 282–3), this conception of authenticity is given a historicisttwist. If a strong commitment to score compliance authenticity is coupled withthe claim that a faithful rendering of W’s score requires performers to follow thenotational conventions and performance practices assumed by W’s composer(Davies 1987: 42–3), then we arrive at the theoretical underpinning for the‘historical authenticity movement’ that gathered speed from the 1960s. Thosewho believe, with Paul Hindemith, that playing Bach’s music as it ought to beplayed requires us to restore the performance practices of that time (Hindemith1950: 17) do so on the basis of taking this intellectual route.5

As far as possible, I shall abstract from the question of whether scorecompliance authenticity is best elaborated in this historicist way. For as I said inSection 1, my interest lies elsewhere: namely, in elaborating another sense in

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© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

which a performance can be faithful to the work performed. With a view toapproaching this second form of authenticity, we may start by observing that adistinctive feature of our musical practice is that we appraise a performance e ofa work W in terms of the convincingness of the performance interpretation of Wthat e presents: that is, according to how convincing is ‘the overall expressive andstructural vision’ (Davies 2011: 34) of W that e displays. To interpret W convinc-ingly in performance is to present W perceptively or insightfully. This, in turn,is a matter of interpreting W with understanding, where what is there to beunderstood in W is W’s content.6 So it follows that in assessing the convincing-ness of e’s performance interpretation of W, we assess e for the extent to whichit is revelatory of W’s content. Particularly highly prized are performanceinterpretations that shed fresh light on W. Such performances reveal aspects ofW’s content that previous performances have missed.7

For e to reveal something of W’s content—for e to show some understandingof W—is for the interpretation e offers to accord with W’s content in some respect.According with W is a way of being faithful to W in performance, if anything is.So it would seem to follow that the performance value I have been describingis a kind of authenticity. But it is equally clear that this value cannot be identifiedwith score compliance authenticity. There are, after all, plenty of ‘page-turning’,drab performances that comply with W’s score while shedding precious littleinterpretive light on W. Consequently, I propose that the performance value wehave here—interpretive authenticity—is a distinct and hitherto unrecognizedform of authenticity. It is that way of being true to a work in performance thatconsists in evincing understanding of it.

Much of what I have said up to now is owed to a penetrating observationmade by Aaron Ridley. Ridley sees clearly that the faithfulness in performancethat seems to matter most to us is ‘a matter of understanding’ (Ridley 2004: 119),and I follow him in holding that e is in this sense more faithful to W the greateris the ‘richness, depth, insight, subtlety and so on’ of the understanding of Wthat e displays (ibid.). Furthermore, Ridley is quite right to distinguish suchfaithfulness from score compliance (ibid.: 119–20): although the two norms oftencoincide, it is possible for them to come apart, as we shall see.

Linking the concepts of interpretive insight and faithfulness in this way is afine thought, and one that many performers seem to have had.8 But if the fullimport of this idea is to be appreciated, it needs more careful handling thanRidley himself gives it. Specifically, two features of Ridley’s presentation must bejettisoned. First, Ridley’s insight should be detached from a use to which he triesto put it: namely, that of arguing against the possibility of giving identityconditions for musical works. Working, first of all, with a rich notion of W’scontent as that revealed by an insightful performance, Ridley notes, correctly,that we cannot specify in advance of any particular performance what it wouldbe for a performance of W to evince such content. After all, new revelatoryperformance interpretations delight us precisely by subverting our expectationsas to the nature of W‘s content (ibid.: 119), perhaps even to the extent oftransforming our conception of W. But then, conflating this kind of content with

Performing Works of Music Authentically 3


the more modest notion at work in the ontology of music—i.e., as that givenby the complex condition a sound-event must meet to be performance ofW—Ridley erroneously concludes that ‘some—or perhaps even all—of a work’sallegedly identity-confirming properties can fail to be reflected in a faithfulperformance of it’ (ibid.: 120).

This is an absurd conclusion, tantamount to the thesis that a sound-event canbe a performance of W even if it follows none of the instructions for performanceencoded in W’s score. Fortunately, though, avoiding this reductio requires usmerely to keep in mind the distinction between the two notions of content thatRidley elides.9 That we cannot specify in advance what any insightful interpre-tation of W must sound like is an important fact about the rich notion of contentcorrelative with that kind of faithfulness cashed out in terms of understanding.But recognizing this is evidently consistent with holding that the modest notionof content of interest to ontologists of music can be specified in advance of anyperformance, simply by consulting W’s score. Furthermore, with this distinctionin place, someone who recognizes Ridley’s richer sense of content can, andshould, acknowledge that a performance that deviates too far from W’s score failsto count as a performance of its intended work at all (Wolterstorff 1980: 78).

The second unacceptable feature of Ridley’s presentation of his position is hisfailure to recognize the faithfulness he describes as a variety of authenticity.Gripped by the confusion outlined above, and perhaps weary of the way inwhich the word ‘authenticity’ has been appropriated by the historical authen-ticity movement, Ridley implies that the concept of authenticity is one that weshould dispense with (Ridley 2004: 126–9). But such a move would be precipi-tate. The conceptual connection between faithfulness and authenticity has beennoted already: an authentic performance of W is one that is faithful to W in someway or other. Nothing about the concept of authenticity itself suggests thatcomplying with W’s score is the only way in which a performance can be faithfulto W. Furthermore, given that musical works are typically composed in order tobe understood, eliciting understanding of W would seem to be a way of beingtrue to W par excellence.

This being so, I propose that we regard the faithfulness in performance towhich Ridley has drawn our attention as a type of authenticity. We shall see thatviewing it in this way nicely enables us to characterize an important way inwhich many performers have thought of their enterprise; and we shall see,further, that there are cases plausibly characterized as ones in which the normsof score compliance authenticity and interpretive authenticity conflict, and inwhich the resultant performance is improved by sacrificing a degree of theformer type of authenticity in order to gain an increase in the latter.

3.

Having cleared away some misunderstandings, let me try to characterize inter-pretive authenticity a little more precisely. A performance of W is interpretively

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authentic to the extent that it offers an interpretation of W that displays a deepor profound understanding of W.10 This is not the place to mount a detaileddefence of a particular account of what it is for a performance to evinceunderstanding of the work performed, but the following characterization iscertainly recognizable and plausible. Inasmuch as an interpretively authenticperformance evinces understanding of W, its detail will have been determined,not just by a grasp of the way in which W unfolds musically, thematically andexpressively, but by an appreciation of the significance—one might say thepoint—of W’s unfolding as it does. Such a performance, in placing an apprecia-tion of W’s detail within the context of an understanding of its point, will therebybe one that is guided by a refined sense of what matters in the presentation of Win performance.11

Inasmuch as evincing such an understanding of W involves revealing ele-ments of W’s content, an interpretively authentic performance of W will be onethat draws something out that is embodied by the notes, but which is onlydiscernible from within the aesthetic vision of a musically literate and sensitiveinterpreter. Characterized in this way, interpretively authentic performances ofW should be contrasted, not just with performances that misunderstand W, butwith performances that are produced with some other aim in mind, such asexpressing the performer’s aesthetic personality.12 Equally, it would be mislead-ing to flatly gloss ‘interpretively authentic’ simply as good, valuable or interesting,since doing so would risk overlooking Ridley’s insight in locating a prime sourceof such value in a kind of faithfulness to W. An interpretively authenticperformance of W, in evincing a profound understanding of W, is faithful to Wby retrieving and displaying elements of W’s musical content.13

Such a performance succeeds in doing this, I have said, by embodying aninterpretation that, among other things, does justice to the significance, or isfaithful to the point, of the performed work’s having the manifest properties ithas. The fact that significance and point figure so centrally in the explication ofinterpretive authenticity reveals two important things about this latter concept.First, interpretive authenticity has an essentially critical, evaluative character(Ridley 2004: 127). Since the degree of a performance’s interpretive authenticityis determined by the extent to which it reveals an understanding of W, and sincethis, in turn, is in part determined by how well its detail brings out W’s characterand point, the performer aiming at interpretive authenticity must take up anessentially interrogative stance towards W: a stance in which she attempts tofigure out why W has the manifest properties it does (Tanner 1985: 227), beforeattempting to bring this out in her performance.14 This is what it is to make senseof W in performing it.

As an example of this process, witness the following remark by John Barbi-rolli, concerning the two years that it usually took him to study a score of aMahler symphony before he was ready to perform it:

Of course it does not take me two years to read these scores, but if youprepare for a journey through such immeasurably wide musical spheres,



you must know exactly where the musical ideas begin and where theyend, and how each fits in to the pattern of the whole. In Mahler’ssymphonies there are many highlights, but only one real climax, whichone must discover. To do so needs less a simple study of the score thanan all-embracing aesthetic vision. (Quoted in Kennedy 1971: 247)

Barbirolli’s point here is that finding what he believes to be the one true climaxin a Mahler symphony, and figuring out how to distil this in a performance ofthe work, requires the performer to form an overall interpretation ‘of what themusical nature of the work in question is: what makes it “go”’ (Kivy 1995: 12).The truthfulness in performance that he is striving for is achieved by sculptingthe performance in such a way as to present a convincing complete interpreta-tion of it. Such a performance—achieved by delicately foregrounding certainfeatures while downplaying or underplaying others—can only be the result oflengthy and profound interpretation; and, insofar as it has this character, such aninterpretively authentic performance cannot be produced merely by understand-ing and putting into practice the instructions laid out in the work’s score. Itrequires the performing artist to start with the score, but then make sense of itin such a way as to find the deeper level of musical content—that involving itssignificance or point—that lies beyond it (DeBellis 2004: 749): something thatmust see him construct an aesthetic vision of the whole.

Appreciating this fact is enough to falsify a certain conception of the place ofinterpretation in performing works authentically. This mistaken conception hasit that the only reason why interpretation has a place in performance is that thescore’s musical notation underdetermines how a correctly formed performancemust sound (Davies 1991: 23; 2001: 209). On this view, performing a workauthentically just requires performers to understand and then follow the score’sinstructions for instantiating the work’s sonic profile: something that will pre-suppose an appreciation of the work’s style and genre, but which will notrequire the kind of creative, evaluative thinking alluded to by Barbirolli. Suchinterpretive thinking, so this story goes, is a matter of the performers using the‘free choices’ left them by the indefiniteness of musical notation (Davies 2001:209): a way of filling the ‘gap’ between notation and the concrete details of theperformance, once the score has settled the issue of how to perform the workfaithfully (Davies 1987: 47–8; 2003: 252; 2010: 39). According to this picture, whileany authentic performance of a work inevitably involves interpretation (sinceany notation will leave the sound of a properly formed performance to a certainextent underdetermined), such interpretation is not itself required to deliver itsauthenticity. ‘Authenticity’, so the saying goes, ‘is a matter of ontology ratherthan interpretation’ (Davies 2001: 227).15

Barbirolli, by contrast, describes himself as aiming at a kind of faithfulness tothe work whose demands on performance are only fully apparent from withinthe interpretive stance.16 Interpretation, on this view, is not merely required to fillin the gap between notation and the sound of the performance; it is also the casethat performers must interpret the work—that is, think creatively about how to

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realize the work in a way that goes beyond the scored notes—in order todetermine what the full requirements of an interpretively faithful performanceare. Discovering the one true climax in a Mahler symphony—finding this in thework and being faithful to this discovery in performance—precisely involvesthe conductor delving beneath the score and making the kinds of critical,aesthetic judgements that make for insightful interpretation. The performingartist’s judgement about how to make his performance of W authentic in thissense is a judgement concerning which features of W should be made salient andwhich less salient in performance (Morris 2008: 2–3): a judgement that is itselfgrounded in further judgements concerning what W’s aesthetically significantfeatures are, and how they can be properly rendered in sound. Performanceinvolves creative interpretation, not merely to bridge the gap between score andsound, but because there is a kind of faithfulness to W whose demands are onlyopen to view if one has the kind of ‘all-embracing aesthetic vision’ of W thatBarbirolli describes.

The second thing revealed by the conceptual connection between interpretiveauthenticity and the notions of significance and point concerns the nature of theconstraints on interpretively authentic performance. Since understanding a workof music involves grasping why it is as it is, an interpretively authentic perform-ance will be constrained, not just by the data delivered by an exposure to W inthe raw, but by knowledge concerning what the composer was trying to achieve,his apparent style and his oeuvre, the influences operative upon him, his personalhistory, and the cultural context in which W was composed. Consider, forinstance, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Mahler viewed this work as his attempt tochallenge the established conception of the symphony as a heroic, triumphantgenre (Bonds 1996: 175); and so, to this end, he took it upon himself to composea symphony sharing the same form as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (i.e., threeinstrumental movements with a vocal finale), but which substituted intimacy,ambivalence and unresolved contradiction for Beethovenian monumentalism,certainty and grand victory. Knowing what we do of what Mahler was attempt-ing here, and being well aware of the political, cultural and intellectual fermentcharacteristic of the fin de siècle Vienna in which Mahler was working, it isplausible to view the point of Mahler’s Fourth—its guiding principle—as itsforming an artistic response to the ‘oppressive certainties’—both musical andspiritual—expressed by Beethoven’s Ninth (ibid.: 199).

Given that this is so, it is reasonable to expect a performance of Mahler’sFourth Symphony to be informed by this data and, as a result, to be governedby a requirement to present, on a smaller, more human scale than envisaged byBeethoven, a mood in which optimism and innocence, on the one hand, andviolence and disturbance, on the other, co-exist. And, of course, such a readingof the work should inform the presentation of the work’s detail. The orchestralinterruptions of the song in the finale should be bold and menacing, the contrastbetween soprano and orchestra accentuated and jagged, and the movementshould end with the song fading away as softly as possible, in order tosimultaneously suggest heavenly sleep and death.



Here, then, we have an (admittedly simplified) example of how an under-standing of a work’s general character, shaped by an appreciation of contextualfactors and the composer’s purposes, imposes specific commitments upon per-formers in order to bring this character out (Sharpe 2004: 110). Having said this,an appeal to intentional factors should not be oversimplified. The medium ofmusic—the presentation of sound-patterns—possesses properties independentlyof the composer’s intentions; and so it is possible for a composer to fail to bringoff his intentions in his work, if he fails to understand these properties or lacksthe skill to work with them effectively (Morris 2007: 69). So, while it remains thecase that judging the extent of a performance’s interpretive authenticity will seeus bringing to bear considerations of an intentionalist and contextualist stripe, awork’s meaning cannot simply be read off from what its composer intended itto be like.17

4.

Now that the notion of interpretive authenticity has been rendered less inchoate,it should be apparent that this kind of authenticity—i.e., performing works withinsight and understanding—is a central performance value within the Westernclassical tradition. For within this tradition, music is a cognitive, not merely adecorative, artform. Musical works of this kind are composed in order to beunderstood; this, we could say, is one of the things they are for (ibid.: 60).Correlatively, as listeners, our aesthetic attitude towards them is cognitive andinquisitive.18 A large part of our interest in such works lies in coming tounderstand them, where this consists, not merely in being able to follow theirsignificant detail, but in understanding why they have the kind of detail theyhave. Given the nature of this interest, a significant goal of work performance isthat of facilitating listeners’ understanding of the works performed. Since we areconcerned to understand the works we listen to, we value performances thatunderwrite this concern by evincing a deep or profound such understanding.Our practice embodies an expectation that performers construct an aestheticvision of W in performance that portrays W in a perceptive, enlightening way.

It is reasonable to think that, for the most part, the performance values ofinterpretive authenticity and score compliance authenticity will coincide. It is agood rule of thumb that presenting W insightfully in performance will requireperformers to obey the totality of the scored instructions of W’s composer. Butit is only a rule of thumb, since our mainstream practice allows that a perform-ance might sometimes make better sense of W, and be more successful as aresult, by virtue of deviating from elements of W’s score. A performer trulysensitive to the music she is playing might judge, from within the aestheticvision of W she constructs, that certain of the specific instructions laid down byW’s composer frustrate the successful development of W’s point, run contraryto W’s character, or otherwise compromise W’s aesthetic consistency;19 and,as a consequence, there might be occasions on which she justifiably concludes

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that such normative conflict is best negotiated by departing from those of thecomposer’s scored instructions that would prevent her from evincing a deeperunderstanding of the work performed.20

Naturally, whether a decision to abandon ideal score compliance for the sakeof evincing greater understanding of W really does result in a better performancecan only be decided on a case-by-case basis. For one thing, it is only by lookingat the details of particular cases that we can determine whether disobeying scoredinstructions genuinely produces a more perceptive performance of W. But moreto the point, even if greater understanding of W is evinced, it remains to be seenwhether such an exchange of score compliance (and, perhaps, other performancevalues) for interpretive insight actually succeeds in making the performancebetter overall. Interpretive authenticity, although a major norm within ourpractice, is only one performance value among many; and it is fanciful to thinkthat there is a common unit of measurement (such as the audience’s enjoyment21)by which we can determine the net evaluative balance of any particular decisionto forsake one performance value for another.22 But it is, nonetheless, true that thecentrality of interpretive authenticity to our tradition of performance practicestrongly suggests that it is at least possible for an exchange of score compliancefor interpretive authenticity to improve a performance. A performance e of Wmight turn out to be better for sacrificing score compliance, if such a sacrifice isrequired for e to maximize the depth or profundity of the understandingmanifested in its performance interpretation of W.

This conclusion, it seems to me, is manifest in mainstream performancepractice. Performers often negotiate normative conflict of the kind envisaged byopting to disobey some of the composer’s scored instructions for the sake ofevincing a deeper understanding of the work performed; and such decisions aresanctioned as respectable interpretive options, and not treated as misconceivedor otherwise deviant. So consider, as a first example of this, the question ofwhether performers should abide by Beethoven’s metronome marks in hisHammerklavier Sonata. Alfred Brendel’s judgement on this subject could not beclearer. In his view, in the first movement particularly, ‘the prescribed tempocannot be attained, or even approached, on any instrument in the world, by anyplayer at all, be he the devil incarnate, without a grievous loss of dynamics,colour and clarity’ (Brendel 2007: 33). So, if we grant that Brendel is right aboutthis, then, unless we think of the first movement of the sonata as not just craggyand sublime, but chaotic (an implausible interpretation, to my mind23), thenobeying Beethoven’s tempic instructions in fact travesties the piece. If we followBrendel in thinking that clarity, colour and dynamic control are fundamental toBeethoven’s music, we will hold that these features should be preserved inperformance, and hence that performers should play the first movement of theHammerklavier Sonata slower than Beethoven specified. If Brendel is right, anunderstanding of the guiding principles of Beethoven’s music, and the Ham-merklavier Sonata’s place within it, imposes a constraint of aesthetic consistencystrong enough to require performers to override one of Beethoven’s own explicitperformance instructions.24



Now focus on the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.25 In theexposition, just as the music modulates from C Minor to E-flat Major, the hornsplay a brief motif that functions as a kind of fanfare. This motif serves to let usknow that something important is about to happen: namely, the unfolding of alyrical fragment in the strings. However, in the recapitulation, the modulation isfrom C Minor to C Major and, no doubt because the valveless horns used inBeethoven’s time could not hit the required notes in the key of C, the motif inquestion is written this time for the bassoons. But since bassoons do not have thetimbre to really carry off such a fanfare, this decision, although quite under-standable in the first decade of the nineteenth century, arguably fails to do fulljustice to the purpose of the fanfare-like motif. And it is for this reason thatmodern conductors tend to depart from the score here and give the motif in therecapitulation to the modern, valved horns, and not to the bassoons. Althoughthe work’s score specifies that bassoons should be used, many conductors feelthat the piece’s internal logic imposes a contrary demand. As they see things, aperformance should be thoroughly faithful to the motif’s evident purpose, andthis requires performers to contravene one of Beethoven’s explicit instructions.

Finally, and most controversially, listen to Andreas Staier’s recent recording ofMozart’s Rondo alla turca (the third movement of the latter’s Piano Sonata K.331).26 Here we have an interpretation of the piece that is rich in theatricality andplayfulness: so much so, that it contains not just huge amounts of embellishmentand ornamentation of the music as written, but a good many alterations of it. Attimes, Staier moves the melody to the bass line, at others he improvisescounter-melodies that take our attention away from the main theme. So what arewe to make of this interpretation? In my view, what we have here is not ajazz-like treatment of the Rondo: Staier is not simply using it as vessel to expresshis aesthetic personality. Neither does the recording have the status of a fantasia.For I think that what is going on here is that Staier is trying to produce preciselythe kind of interpretation that best evinces the Rondo’s point, given the work’splace within our musical culture in the twenty-first century. The Rondo is a ‘littleethnic showpiece’ (Staier 2005: 12): a puckish mischief-maker designed tocaricature the Turkish style through stylistic exaggeration (Friesenhagen 2005:10). The fact that the piece has this cartoonish point at once suggests that whatmatters in its performance is ‘not the sacred inviolability of each note, but theintegrity of [Mozart’s] conception’ (Staier 2005: 12). And this fact, given theRondo’s ubiquity in modern culture, arguably means that a contemporaryperformer, if he is to succeed in evincing the work’s point to his audience, is bestserved by accentuating its cartoonish character still further in the kinds ofdepartures from the score that Staier goes in for. On this reading of Staier’sperformance interpretation, it is a genuine sensitivity to the work that leads himto abandon ideal fidelity to the score for something else. And this something elseis interpretive authenticity: being true to the work by interpreting it in a way thatdisplays insight into its nature. Once again, we see a performer concluding thatan exchange of textual fidelity for interpretive authenticity makes for a moresuccessful performance.

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Since the demands of interpretive authenticity are only perceptible from aperspective afforded by the kind of all-embracing aesthetic vision described byBarbirolli, these three examples are of their nature controversial: Staier’sapproach to the Rondo especially so.27 However, readers unconvinced by themshould not be spooked by this, but just think of their own. Our practice aboundswith them. What matters is not that aesthetic agreement is reached on thetreatment given to specific examples, but that we internalize the moral thatemerges from the discussion of such cases. A score is a ‘site of negotiation’between composer and performing artist:28 something reflecting the fact that theperspective enjoyed by preparing a work for performance is a source of freshinsight into how to perform the work successfully. Specifically, the understand-ing that comes from adopting the perspective of the performer might revealelements of the work’s score to conflict with its nature at the more thematic levelthat supplies its overall point or meaning. Sometimes performers will judge,quite justifiably, that such conflict is best resolved by, in effect, revising the score.Of course, we might question whether the full extent of Staier’s revisionism ofthe Rondo is really called for; but his approach to this work is interpretivelydefensible. If we share his conception of the piece, we are likely to judge hisrevisions to elicit a greater understanding of it and, insofar as they do this, tojustify his abandonment of ideal textual fidelity.

In any case, for my thesis concerning the defensibility of abandoning full scorecompliance to stand, its supporting examples need not be actual: they mighttake the form of thought experiments. So James Young asks us to imagine apossible world in which Frescobaldi’s notorious instructions for performing hiskeyboard pieces are written into their scores. In such a situation, Young suggests,performers might be wise to disregard them (Young 1988: 232). Just as long assuch disregard is based on a concern to evince an insightful or otherwiseenlightening picture of the said works, my point is made.

Alas, Young himself, in common with fellow critics of the historical authen-ticity movement, such as Peter Kivy, fails to explain the felt requirement toabandon score compliance in such cases in the right kind of way. Young statesthat the ideal of historical authenticity, however elaborated, is not worth attain-ing, and that performers should aim, not at giving historically authentic per-formances but at giving ‘successful ones’ (ibid.: 236). Kivy, in the same vein,claims that the best performance is the one that gives the (sensitive, musicallyliterate) listener ‘the most aesthetic satisfaction’: that which ‘sounds best’ to her(Kivy 1995: 179). But this is of no help unless we know what the criteria forsuccess in these terms are; and neither Young nor Kivy is particularly helpfulhere. For sure, it is not much help to be told that the road to the best performanceis provided by ‘the genius of the performer tested by the listener’s ear’ (Kivy1995: xiii): we need to know what it is that guides the performer with genius andthe discerning listener alike.

I, at least, have a suggestion that sets my position apart from that of familiarcritics of historical authenticity (and of score compliance authenticity moregenerally). And it is that our practice is characterized by concern for a variety of



faithfulness to the work—a breed of authenticity, in other words—that poten-tially diverges from score compliance and, where it does so, can override it. Inthe kinds of examples we have been considering, score compliance is justifiablysacrificed for the sake of achieving a performance interpretation that is percep-tive in the vision of W it displays. The discerning listener to a piece of Westernclassical music is the person whose aesthetic satisfaction is in part determined bythe depth and insight evinced of the work performed.

5.

I say this. Interpretive authenticity is a significant performance value, and it ispossible for a performance to be better for being less score compliant, if such asacrifice of textual fidelity makes the performance more interpretively authenticas a result. In a situation in which the norms of interpretive authenticity and fullscore compliance conflict, a performer keen to make her performance as worth-while as possible might have to overrule those scored instructions that frustratethe maximization of interpretive authenticity.

All of this will make those I have characterized as score compliance hard-liners decidedly edgy. Davies, for one, would not recognize interpretive authen-ticity as a variety of authenticity at all (Davies 2010: 32). But more significantlystill, he would deny that it could ever be an acceptable interpretive option—other than in the most non-standard of circumstances—to deliberately departfrom an easily performable scored instruction. For Davies, as we saw in Section1, claims score compliance to be a non-negotiable performance value (Davies2001: 241); and although he nowhere precisely formulates this claim, we canplausibly put it like this: modulo practical constraints or other highly unusualcircumstances of performance, compromising ideal score compliance for the sakeof attaining other performance values cannot make for a better performance ofW.29 I, by contrast, think that such compromises of score compliance can bejustified in standard circumstances and where no practical obstacles to full scorecompliance exist. Consequently, if Davies’s non-negotiability thesis is correct, Iwould seem to have got things very wrong. So what, according to Davies, is theorigin of my mistake?

Davies believes that a position like mine can only be the result of looking atour musical practice through a glass darkly. In ‘[a]dvocating that the musiciandeliberately depart from what is instructed, even when she could meet therequirements’, I make ‘an odd recommendation indeed’ (ibid.: 248). And thereason why this recommendation is so odd, Davies continues, is that it runscounter to the very point of work performance. As he sees it,

[i]t is one thing to play wrong notes accidentally and quite another toplay wrong notes deliberately for the sake of achieving an interestinginterpretation. [Such a] recommendation is strange because it sets theplayer’s intention at odds with the goal of work performance. . . . It is as

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if this performer does not understand what work performance is. He islike a chess player who knows all the moves but does not understandthat the aim of the game is to capture his opponent’s king. He misses thepoint of the enterprise and in that respect is not ‘playing the game’.(ibid.)30

So what is the claimed point of work performance that I have overlooked? Justthis: to ‘present’ the composer’s ideas (Davies 1987: 47); that is, to ‘transmit’ theseideas (Davies 1991: 25), not tinker with them. According to Davies, the enterpriseof performing W has ‘the delivery of the composer’s work as its goal’, and thatis it (Davies 2001: 253). The performer ‘stands between the composer and his orher audience’ (Davies 1987: 46), her role being that of ‘delivering’ the former’smusical ideas—as expressed in the work’s score—from the one to the other(Davies 1991: 25; 2001: 249, 251). Performers, according to this conception, havethe freedom to interpret W within the bounds set by W’s score; to think that theyhave the freedom to ignore easily accomplishable scored instructions is toconfuse legitimate liberty with licence (ibid.: 226).

However, such talk of the goal of the enterprise of work performance ismisconceived in its unargued and, I claim, distorting reductionism. I acknowl-edge that score compliance is a legitimate performance value; and I accept thatscore compliance’s being such a value stems from the fact that a point of workperformance is to transmit the composer’s musical ideas. But this is not the onlypoint performers legitimately find in performing works of music: they also seekto make the best sense they can of the works they perform; to evince insight intheir performance of them. Performing artists, we have seen, tend to view whatthey are doing as involving the attempt to shed light on the works they performby coming up with convincing interpretations of them in performance. This, too,is a point of work performance and, as we have seen, it may on occasionoverride the goal of maximizing textual fidelity.

Seeing things in this more pluralist way is preferable to Davies’s conceptionof the nature and point of work performance for two reasons. First, in taking ourinterest in performing works of music to comprise the interpretation of thecomposer’s musical ideas as well as their delivery, it makes better sense of thepractices of performers: of the decisions they make, and why they make them.For it is precisely because performers tend to adopt such an interpretiveoutlook—one that looks beyond the score to present a convincing overallaesthetic vision of the piece—that they sometimes deem it necessary to abandonfull score compliance for the sake of making what they take to be better senseof the work performed.

Davies, committed to viewing the purpose of performing a work of music asthat of transmitting the composer’s musical ideas, accordingly slips into thetraduced conception of interpretation’s place in performance that we rejected inSection 3: a conception that sees interpretation as called for solely to fill the gapbetween score and performance, and, consequently, as something that is merelyinstrumental to fulfilling what he regards as performance’s real point. Tellingly,



however, such a position prevents Davies from adequately explaining themotives of performers. Hamstrung by his jejune account of the place of inter-pretation in performance, Davies can only represent a performer’s decision todeliberately ignore an easily observable scored instruction as a misplacedpreference for playing the ‘wrong notes deliberately for the sake of achieving aninteresting interpretation’ (ibid.: 248; my emphasis). But this way of putting itmisrepresents how mainstream musicians tend to think of things. Performerswho think deeply and respectfully about the works they perform depart fromthe score, not for the sake of giving an interpretation that is novel or otherwiseinteresting, but because they think that doing so evinces a profounder insight intothose works. Walter Carlos’s Switched On Bach—a recording of the BrandenburgConcerto No. 2 using a Moog synthesizer—is an interesting interpretation of thepiece, no doubt; but it is an interpretation that, in the violence it does to thework’s delicacy and tone colour, seems to privilege innovation over understand-ing. This is why it has swiftly become a shop-worn novelty: an interestingtravesty, at best. To make sense of what Brendel, or Gould, or even Staier, isdoing when they depart from the score, we must accept that they are aiming atsomething different from Carlos. They deviate from the score because they takethemselves to be led in this direction by an understanding of the work withwhich they are concerned. It is a kind of faithfulness, not a shallow concern todo something novel, that motivates them.

The second reason for preferring my framework to Davies’s is that it betterexplains the very nature of performance interpretation. Recognizing interpretiveauthenticity as a significant performance value nicely captures what the per-ceptiveness of a performance interpretation of W consists in. Such perceptive-ness, as would seem obvious, is a matter of the interpretation’s revealingsomething of what W is really like; and this it does by interpreting W in sucha way as to reveal some of its underlying musical content. A perceptiveperformance thereby gets W right in some way: it is in this sense a performancethat is faithful to W. As we saw in Section 1, this makes such perceptiveness asort of authenticity.

Davies, by contrast, struggles to bring to bear adequate conceptual resourcesto properly characterize success in interpretation. Since he takes interpretationto enter the scene solely as a filler of the gap between score and performance,and since the only way of being true to a work that he recognizes is that of‘render[ing] faithfully to the audience that which is determined of the soundof the performance in the work’s specification’ (Davies 1987: 46), he lacks aconvincing way of explaining what it could be for a performance interpretation tobe perceptive, or revelatory, in the way that interests us. To put it bluntly, ifinterpretation is just that which fleshes out the score into a determinate soundevent, and if such interpretation is not itself a vehicle of faithfulness to the workperformed, it is unclear how such an interpretation could in itself reveal anythingabout the work at all.

This bind is reflected in the way in which Davies himself talks of interpre-tations as ‘interesting’ rather than as insightful (Davies 2001: 248), in his claim

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that interpretive choice is ‘free within the broad limits set by the style and genreof the piece’ (ibid.: 111), and in his tendency to conceive of interpretation withinthese broad limits as ‘decoration’ (ibid.: 110). The picture seemingly at work hereis one in which, within the limits imposed by a grasp of the score’s instructionsand an understanding of the piece’s style and genre, interpretive choice isunconstrained. But if this is so, then we cannot explain how one performancewithin these limits can be any more perceptive than any other. A more perceptiveperformance is one that is more sensitive to the constraints on interpretationimposed by the work; but if Davies is right, once the score’s instructions, itsstyle, and its genre have been established, there exist no more such constraintsfor the performance to measure up to.

The problem with this is the way it evidently cuts against the grain of ourmusical experience. For it is extremely compelling to think that a performer’schoice of interpretation is itself constrained by what a penetrating andnuanced understanding of the work would supply, even after the question ofits score compliance (and its style and genre) has been settled. Consider twointerpretations of a Bach invention, which are both score compliant andequally in keeping with the work’s style and genre. Now imagine that the firstinterpretation brings out an inner line in a way that the second does not.31

Davies must say that the first interpretation is no more true to the work—nomore perceptive of it—than the second. Authenticity, in his view, consists inaccurately translating the score into sound, and, what is more, the interpre-tations cannot be discriminated according to the way in which they coherewith the work’s style and genre. So although Davies can allow that we preferthe first interpretation to the second, what he cannot acknowledge is that thefirst interpretation displays more understanding of the piece than the second.That is, he cannot say that the first interpretation is in this sense the morefaithful to the piece.

This conclusion strikes me as profoundly wrong. The decision of our firstperformer to bring out the inner line reveals a level of understanding of the Bachinvention that is lacking in the second. Although both performers are equallyadept at translating the score’s atomic instructions into sound, only the firstevinces the full significance of the fact that the work is a weaving together ofdistinct melodic voices. Examples like this can only show that interpretativechoice is motivated by something more substantial than the need to flesh out thework’s score (admittedly, within certain limits) in order to bridge the gapbetween score and performance. And, indeed, this is how performing artiststhemselves tend to see things, typically regarding what they do, not merely asfilling gaps left open by the composer’s notation, but as making decisions which,if things go well, bring to the surface elements of the work’s content that are notsimply determined by its score, style and genre (DeBellis 2004: 749): that is, alevel of musical content that is only approached when performing artists treatthe work’s score as a starting point for the construction of an overall aestheticvision. To reveal such deeper musical content in a performance of a work is toperform that work with interpretive authenticity.



6.

I contend that Davies’s commitment to the non-negotiability of ideal scorecompliance is motivated by a simplistic conception of the aim of work perform-ance. This invites the question of how Davies could have arrived at such aconception. My conjecture is that at the root of Davies’s thinking lies a mistakenway of conceiving of the nature of the composer’s authority. I shall end thispaper elaborating on this theme.

Davies notes that

[w]e care for the works of composers and for performances at least inpart for the works they reveal. We are not concerned with performancesmerely as pleasant playings that may be only incidentally related to theworks they purport to be of. (Davies 2001: 250)

This is something with which everyone should agree. What I think I haveshown, however, is that there is a kind of revelation that we value in workperformance—namely, the insight and understanding evinced by the uncoveringof a work’s deep musical content—that may legitimately prompt performers todepart from some of the specific instructions recorded in the work’s score.Having said this, the striking feature of Davies’s thinking is his presentation ofthe quoted passage as summing up a commitment to score compliance as anon-negotiable norm. Why does he hear it in this way?

An answer, I think, lies in his conception of the composer’s authority over theperformance of his works. Davies takes the care we have for the works ofcomposers to be based upon ‘a more fundamental concern with the authority ofauthorship’ (Davies 1987: 46). But this just prompts a further question: whyshould we think that the authority of the composer over performers entails thenon-negotiability of score compliance? For here is an obvious reply to thisentailment thesis. While composers often know best how to do justice to theirworks in performance, they are not infallible in this regard. The composer doesnot always know best (Kivy 1995: 161–71). To lean on what is, by now, a familiarexample, once Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is considered from the vantage pointafforded us by our current musico-historical context, it is plausible to think thatperformers should play the fanfare-like motif of the first movement’s recapitu-lation on modern, valved horns, thereby overruling Beethoven’s explicit direc-tion to use bassoons. Beethoven was not to know that, over a hundred yearsin the future, a profounder understanding of his work could be evinced bycontradicting one of his explicit instructions.

What Davies must provide, then, is a convincing reason for resisting this lineof response: a reason for supposing that performers’ concern with the authorityof authorship imposes upon them a non-negotiable commitment to performingworks in strict accordance with the instructions composers encode in theirscores. However, what he has to say here is not very convincing.

Davies claims that the kind of position he wishes to adopt on score compli-ance falls out of our interest in ‘musical works as of their composers’ (Davies

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2001: 248). It is because we have this interest, he suggests, that score complianceis not negotiable, since such authenticity ‘is the means by which composers’works are transmitted’ (ibid.: 249). But the problem here is that the ‘as of’locution is rather obscure. Picking apart Davies’s text, there would seem to betwo distinct ways of characterizing what he presents as our interest in works asof their composers. First, Davies seems to suggest that we must think of W asits composer’s, if we are to be able to have distinguishing knowledge of whatwork it is that is instantiated by multiple performances:

Performances are of works and works are identified in terms of theircomposers. The composer’s name is not attached to the work merely asa convenient index that helps us to refer to it. It is not that we usecomposers’ names only because other labels are less convenient . . . If weare interested in works that are identifiable from performance to performance, itmust be works as of their composers that concern us, because, if wedisregard the work’s composer, we strip the piece of many of thecontextual features on which its identity depends. (ibid.: 250; myemphasis)

The idea here would seem to be that we must think of, say, The Lark Ascendingas Vaughan Williams’s if we are to be able to keep in mind the musico-historicalcontext in which it was composed, and thereby come to recognize thosecontextually-determined properties it possesses that in part make it the workthat it is. But even if such a contextualist account of work individuation isgranted,32 the non-negotiability of score compliance does not follow. For, havinggained the kind of distinguishing knowledge of W that Davies describes, wemight nonetheless judge that a more subtle or profound understanding of W canbe evinced only if certain of the score’s instructions are overruled. This kind offaithfulness to the work—the kind that consists in evincing understanding of itin performance—is an interpretive, critical property, not an ontological one.Consequently, the fact that we need to have knowledge of those contextualfeatures that determine what it is to perform W accurately does not entail thatperformers should always aspire to ideal textual accuracy in performance. As wehave seen, a performance’s deliberately departing from the score in places mightenable it to evince a profounder understanding of W, and might improve it asa result.

So much for this attempt to explain the ‘as of’ locution and, in so doing,motivate his claim that score compliance is non-negotiable. There is, though,another account of the nature of our interest in works as of their composers inthe offing.33 For Davies seems to present this interest in W as an interest in W as‘a sophisticated human product’ (ibid.: 250). And what he seems to mean by thisis that our aesthetic appreciation of W involves appreciating the composer’sachievement in composing W. As he explains:

An interest in the work involves a concern with the musical achieve-ments it displays, viewed for their own sake . . . And the point about



these achievements is that they are done. Music of this degree ofcomplexity requires great skill in its creation; it is a sophisticated humanproduct. (ibid.)

This, he claims, is one reason why ‘a commitment to (score compliance)authenticity must be primary’ (ibid.: 251).34 This argument, though, trades on anon sequitur. Even if it is true that our aesthetic appreciation of a work of musicinvolves an assessment of the composer’s achievement in composing it35—something that will require the listener to assess the work against the back-ground of the musico-historical context in which the composer was situated—itdoes not follow that performers should always aim at delivering maximalfidelity to the work’s score. For a performer might have the utmost understand-ing and respect for the composer’s achievement and yet notice that something ofthe work’s character, or something of its point, is compromised unless the scoreis departed from in some way. Think again of Brendel’s remarks on Beethoven’smetronome marks in the first movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata. His pointis that crucial features of the music are spoiled if the movement is played at thetempo specified by Beethoven. In order to bring out some of the most importantfeatures in Beethoven’s own work, and thereby make the performance asworthwhile as possible, we must disobey one of his own instructions.

Davies could reply, I suppose, by insisting that the composer always knowsbest how his works should be performed. But this claim looks extremelyimplausible. For example, it should come as no surprise that a gifted andsensitive pianist such as Brendel, steeped in Beethoven’s music and the traditionof its performance, might justifiably conclude that some of the fine details of thework’s score, if followed, would frustrate the articulation of its deeper musicalcontent and, in so doing, deeply mar the performance.36 We cannot rule out thispossibility by fiat.

7.

Davies is right to say that we are concerned with performances of works ‘for thelight they shed on’ the works performed (ibid.: 253). But insofar as any light thatis shed is a matter of the performance’s displaying understanding of the workperformed, Davies cannot adequately say what this phenomenon consists in. Fora performance to shed light on a work is for the performance to be true to thatwork; so it follows that what we have here is a kind of authenticity. However,if, as Davies believes, the only authenticity there is is score compliance authen-ticity, he cannot properly explain what such enlightenment amounts to.

A more satisfying conception has it that interpretation itself aims at achievinga kind of faithfulness to the work, not merely at filling the gap between score andsound once the demands of faithfulness have been settled. Interpretation, on thisricher account, itself has the goal of shedding light on the performed work bydeepening or rendering more complete our understanding of it. Unsurprisingly,

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given the enlightening perspective on works afforded by performing them,performers quite often decide to abandon ideal score compliance for the sake ofachieving this aim. Such cases are not rare and they are not degenerate. What theyreveal is the nature of a kind of authenticity that matters dearly to us.37

Julian DoddPhilosophy, School of Social SciencesUniversity of [email protected]

NOTES

1 Hereafter, by ‘work of music’ I mean ‘work of Western “classical” music’. What Ihave to say in this paper has no bearing on other traditions of work performance.

2 The ceteris paribus clause is important here: we need to allow that there may beoccasions in which F-ness is a performance value for works such as W, and yet aperformance of W is worse for being more F (when increasing the performance’s F-nessleads to a more profound diminution in other performance values).

3 The name ‘score compliance authenticity’ is mine, although, as we shall see, it namesthe performance value that Davies believes to be the most fundamental in our practice ofperforming works of Western classical music (Davies 1987; 1988; 1991; 2001; 2003).

4 Two comments are usefully made at this point. First, the way in which scorecompliance has been formulated—as fidelity to the publicly expressed instructions of W’scomposer—nicely illustrates James Young’s observation that Davies’s account of authen-ticity construes this property as involving fidelity to the composer’s (work-determinative)intentions (Young 2005: 390).

Second, the restriction of the account to work-determinative instructions is significant.Work-determinative instructions are indications in scores that must be followed in orderfor a performance to represent the performed work accurately. These are to be distin-guished from notational elements that have the status of mere recommendations or piecesof advice: indications that the performer need not follow in order to perform the workaccurately. Whether an element in a score is a work-determinative instruction or a mererecommendation is determined by what the extant musical practice allows the composerand performer to do. According to Davies, if the composer of a violin partita were tospecify in its score that it be played using a Stradivarius, this would not have the statusof an instruction, since there exists no convention of treating such pronouncements asinstructions (Davies 2001: 211–12).

5 John Butt (2002: 3) drew my attention to this claim of Hindemith’s.6 This notion of the content (or meaning) of a work of music is in line with a familiar

conception of the content of something in general: namely, as that which is to beunderstood in it. It is this conception that underlies Michael Dummett’s well-knownslogan that a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding (Dummett 1975: 99). Thetruism that Dummett relies upon here, and which I am applying to the content of musicalworks, is that to accept that something has a content is to accept that there is somethingto be understood in it, and vice versa.

Two clarifications are worth making, however. First, I am involved in no explanatorycircularity in saying, as I do, that what is to be understood in W is W’s content, and that



W’s content is what is to be understood in it. I merely rely on Dummett’s slogan, whichtreats neither the notion of content nor that of understanding as explanatorily prior. Formy purposes, all I need to establish is that the interpreter’s task of understanding W isa substantial one; and for this task to be substantial, it is not required that we explain thenotion of a work’s content independently of the notion of understanding. An aptcomparison in this regard is with the task of seeing what is to be seen. If there issomething to be seen, then the task of seeing what is to be seen is substantial enough torequire attention; and making this fact clear does not depend on there being a way ofcharacterizing what is to be seen independently of the idea of vision. (I thank MichaelMorris for helping me to clarify this.)

Second, we should be careful not to treat features specific to linguistic content ascharacteristic of content in general. The content of a sentence is a proposition: somethingthat can be grasped finally and completely. An artwork’s content, by contrast, transcendsall interpretations; its discovery is indefinitely extendable (Morris 2007: 57–8; 2008: 5). Itis this that explains both why the interpretation of an artwork—whether in performanceor in words—can never be finished, and why very different interpretive approaches canevince understanding.

7 Our critical discourse amply demonstrates the value placed on novel revelatoryperformances. Here is just one example. If Mark Swed is right, the revelatoriness, andhence greatness, of Eva-Pekka Salonen’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphonyconsists in its having ‘captur[ed] the complex and contradictory Sibelian sensation of aprocess that feels unstoppable but whose outcome is not inevitable’ (Los Angeles Times: 24May 2004).

8 Paul Myers, the producer of some of Glenn Gould’s recordings, remembers Gouldconceiving of the goal of performance as being that of achieving just such a kind oftruthfulness. According to Myers, while Gould’s approach to the solo repertoire was‘unmistakably original’, his purpose was not simply to express himself (and thereby riskmisrepresenting the music he performs), but to give the listener a chance ‘to reconsiderhis attitude towards a particular work—to “rethink” the entire piece, if necessary—and soachieve a deeper and more complete understanding of it.’ For Myers, the enjoyment inlistening to a Gould performance of a familiar work consists in hearing how ‘he pulls itapart and reconstructs it, [thereby] reveal[ing] new facets of the music which I, for one,may never have considered’ (quoted in Payzant 1997: 50).

9 As Andrew Kania (2008: 66–8) nicely makes clear.10 Interpretive authenticity, thus characterized, admits of degree: e is a more authentic

performance of W, the deeper, richer, and more insightful is the interpretation of W itoffers.

11 Here I follow David Davies (2011: 15) in including a work’s point in its content.Similar sentiments are expressed by Jerrold Levinson (1993: 61), Ridley (2004: 37), andMichael Tanner (1985: 220, 227). No doubt, Roger Scruton would dispute this construal ofmusical understanding, since he works with an austere, acousmatic model of thisphenomenon (Scruton 1997: ch. 8). For criticism of Scruton’s acousmaticism, see Hamilton2009.

12 Peter Kivy (1995: 123) calls this goal in performance ‘personal authenticity’. Itshould be clear that the interpretive authenticity I am interested in—a form of faithfulnessto the work—should not be confused with this latter kind of faithfulness to theperformer’s artistic persona.

13 Kania, it seems to me, makes something like this mistake in taking Ridley to use‘faithful’ in a non-standard way to mean ‘“good” or “valuable”’ (Kania 2008: 67). Ridley’s

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use of this term, like mine, is standard. A faithful performance of W is one that is true toW. Ridley’s (wholly correct) point is that there is another way of being faithful to a workof music than by abiding by the determinative instructions for performing it encoded inthe work’s score.

14 This notion of the interrogative stance is borrowed from David Davies (2011: 15).15 In saying this, I acknowledge that Davies states that ‘[i]nterpretation is not

something added after the delivery of the work is secured’ (Davies 2010: 39). I take it thatDavies here means to deny that preparing a work for performance is a two-stage processin which performers first of all aim to play W accurately and only later apply aninterpretive gloss to it. But to deny that preparing a work for performance is such adual-stage process is not to deny that performance is a dual-component phenomenon; and itremains true that, insofar as Davies thinks that score compliance, and not interpretation,delivers authenticity in performance, interpretation and score compliance are two distinctcomponents of performance.

16 Here I take myself to be giving shape to Stefano Predelli’s insistence that compo-sitions are essentially subject to interpretation, and not merely so by dint of the contin-gencies of musical notation (Predelli 1995: 346; see also Predelli 2006: 150).

17 This last claim is, I suppose, controversial; but for my present purpose, little hangson it, so I will not defend it further here.

18 Nelson Goodman (1976: 241–2) characterizes the aesthetic attitude in general inthese terms. I think he is right to do this, but will not defend this more general claim here.

19 This notion of aesthetic consistency is borrowed from Michael Krausz (1993: 111).20 Scruton puts this point very nicely. Performers, he explains, are in the business of

presenting the pitches represented in a score as music; and this entitles them ‘to makewhatever additions and adjustments are required by a musical understanding’ (Scruton1997: 441).

21 For a (to my mind, decisive) attack on empiricist theories of value, see Sharpe 2000.22 For a discussion of some of the kinds of features plausibly taken to be performance

values within the Western classical tradition, see Levinson 1987.23 Artur Schnabel would demur from this, of course. But such a disagreement, in

bringing to the surface competing conceptions of the nature of the Hammerklavier Sonata, isonly to be expected. Detecting the demands of interpretive authenticity requires performersto make interpretive judgements: judgements that, of their nature, will tend to be contested.

24 Some musicologists suspect that Beethoven’s metronome might have been faulty;others think that Beethoven’s metronome marks might have been a slip of the pen,reflecting a subjective impression rather than a clear intention. For discussion of this issue,see Stadlen 1967. But for my purposes, such controversies do not really matter. All I wantto show is that our practice is such as to allow performers to sometimes forsake maximalscore compliance when it conflicts with the performance value of interpretive authenticity.To get my point, readers only need see that there could be a case like my description ofthe Hammerklavier Sonata’s metronome markings.

25 I am grateful to Mark Evan Bonds for this example.26 Andreas Staier, Mozart Piano Sonatas K. 330, K. 331, K. 332. Harmonia Mundi,

HMC 901856 (2005).27 Some might be tempted to see Staier’s recording as simply an exercise in provo-

cation for the sake of making an overexposed work more interesting for a jaded audience.But such an account fails to explain the motivation of a performer whose concern forhistorical authenticity is manifest in his decision to perform the piece on a fortepianomodelled on one built in 1786. Far more convincing is the thought that Staier sees



contextual conditions as requiring him to deviate from the Rondo’s score in order toconvey what makes the work ‘tick’: that is, in order to maximize interpretive authenticityin its performance.

28 The apt phrase ‘site of negotiation’ is borrowed from the musicologist and forte-pianist, John Irving.

29 My attribution of this thesis to Davies stems from the fact that he explicitly rejectswhat he calls consequentialism about performance value: the view that score compliance ‘isonly one source of value in performance, and . . . can be exchanged for others, providedthe performance is improved . . . as a result’ (Davies 2001: 240).

The first, qualifying, clause in my presentation of Davies’s position is intended totake account of his claim that it would be ‘a mistake to be overly prissy about the needto pursue ideal (score compliance) authenticity’ (ibid.: 248). Very occasionally, Daviesthinks, striving for ideal score compliance authenticity is just ‘too difficult, or incon-venient, or aesthetically unattractive, given the circumstances of performance’ (ibid.: 32).What Davies has in mind here are a very small class of exceptions such as thefollowing: a suburban opera group’s mounting a Shostakovich opera in English, andwith a mixed chamber group instead of a full orchestra (ibid.: 248); a horn player’susing a valved, instead of a valveless, horn in a Schubert symphony (ibid.: 222); and aconductor’s deciding to depart from full score compliance in the performance of oneof the repertoire’s war-horses, in order to engage a jaded audience’s attention (ibid.:244–5). Unfortunately, Davies does not make it clear whether he regards such perform-ances as (a) better for being less score compliant, or (b) worse for being less scorecompliant, but excusably so.

30 I take it that Davies here uses ‘play[ing] the wrong notes’ as a catch-all for‘disobeying the composer’s instructions’. On this understanding of this phrase, the kindsof departure from the score discussed in Section 4 are of the type that he would classifyas ‘not playing the game’, since the circumstances of performance involved in theseexamples are not of the kind that he believes to excuse such infractions (see n. 29 above).In each case, no practical obstacles stand in the way of following the relevant scoredinstruction, while Staier’s adjustments to the Rondo are not designed to engage a jadedaudience’s attention, but to evince understanding.

31 This example is adapted from one employed by Mark DeBellis (2004: 749).32 Both Kivy (1987) and I (2007, ch. 9) have denied it.33 Although Davies himself (2001: 250–1) presents it as an elaboration of the previous

point.34 By ‘primary’ here, I think Davies must mean ‘non-negotiable’. He does not himself

explain his use of this term.35 As is argued in Dutton 1979 and David Davies 2004. This view is still controversial,

however. For a dissenting voice, see Lessing 1965.36 Nicholas Kenyon reports Jorge Bolet as making just such a point. According to

Kenyon, Bolet justified changing passages in Chopin on the ground that ‘Chopin wasconcerned with the piece only for a few months, but he had played it for years andthought he knew more about what worked and what did not’ (Kenyon 1988: 14).

37 This article is dedicated to my friend and colleague, Peter Goldie. Earlier versionswere presented at the Philosophy Work-in-Progress Seminar at Manchester, and at variousevents at King’s College London, The University of Bristol, The University of Leeds, TheUniversity of Nottingham, The University of Central Lancashire, Tilburg University andthe Open University. I thank all those who attended. Many thanks, too, to a EuropeanJournal Philosophy referee, who offered many helpful suggestions.

Julian Dodd22


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performing works of music authentically

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