Document Type

Bringing the Score to Life

Abstract

Richard Taruskin’s writings on the Early Music Movement had a pivotal influence on debates surrounding the concept of historical authenticity in musical performance. Taruskin championed the thesis that historically-informed performance (HIP) is only tenuously connected to actual past practices, that “a specious veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around” (as Taruskin wrote in a 1988 essay, reprinted in his seminal collection Text and Act). In arguing his case, he correctly diagnosed the practices and motivations of a major group of performers within the Early Music Movement. However, his insistence on presenting this strand as the only major facet of the Movement yielded overgeneralizations and blatant misrepresentations.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Taruskin iconoclastic claims were often treated as the new orthodoxy, stifling rather than encouraging debate. Several prominent scholars (e.g., Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist in their introduction to Rethinking Music) implicitly or even explicitly treated his essays as a conversation-stopper as far as the issue of historical performance was concerned, concluding that further discussion on the concept of the Early Music Movement was redundant. However, Taruskin’s views also inspired a more nuanced response, especially from scholar-performers actively engaged in HIP (e.g., John Butt, Peter Walls). Such scholars and musicians responded to Taruskin’s points with a mixture of frank admiration and critical resistance, which inspired new discourse on the subject even after Taruskin himself had officially taken his leave of it.