Lengua Castellana y Literatura

Historical performance at the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism

Until recently, historically informed performers were in no doubt about the nature of their enterprise, ‘This is my historical (or old) violin’, they would say, and, if they also played conventional instruments, ‘This is my modern violin.’ But all this was challenged by Richard Taruskin’s con-tention that much of what goes on in HIP is in fact modern performance, that the urge to perform in an ‘historical’ fashion and – particularly – the musical results, bear all the traces of musical high modernism. The movement apparently shares much with Stravinsky’s attitude to perfor-mance and covertly continues general tendencies evident since the mid-dle of the twentieth century: a privileging of text over performance, and an increasingly strict, geometrical approach to rhythm.^ On the whole, Taruskin sees ‘modernism’ as virtually synonymous with musicological positivism, objectivism and the retreat from personal commitment and human involvement in musical interpretation. He suggests that the ‘post-modern’ will provide some solution (whether ‘historically informed’ or not) by reintroducing the human element, breaking down grand claims for truth and allowing more freedom in performance.

It is the aim of this chapter to explore the relation of historical perfor-mance to modernism and postmodernism in more detail. For, although Taruskin’s claims have usefully precipitated a debate about the place of HIP in late twentieth-century western culture, they do presuppose very specific and restricted definitions of the terms ( just as they focus only on certain tendencies within HIP itself ). Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile Taruskin’s promotion of postmodernism as something that will break down the status of the serious, classical musical work(Text and Act, p.), leading to a post-authoritarian approach to performance (p. ), with his complaint that many HIP performers devalue and decanonise great musical works (p.) and forsake the authority of a conductor.

Here I attempt something of a genealogy of HIP, placing it within the various debates on modernism and postmodernism in the hope of



 Culture of the late twentieth century

highlighting something of the complex interaction of cultural and histor-ical forces involved. Some of the things I suggest will go against the grain of the more usual presuppositions about modernism, postmodernism and HIP in general. For example, I believe that while modernism is un-doubtedly the correct label for the literalistic and mechanistic approach to HIP, there are also certain elements in the modernist approach to history that might both explain some of the more inspiring aspects of HIP and still be of benefit for its continuing dialogue with history. On the other hand, the extraordinary surge of interest in HIP, from the late

s onwards, coincides and resonates with many of the theories and descriptions of postmodernism. Indeed the HIP phenomenon, at least since becoming a major cultural and commercial force, cannot be un-derstood without reference to the ‘postmodern condition’. But to suggest that the postmodern styles of art we experience at the outset of a new century are historically necessary and the only ‘true’ conception of the times is to fall into a totalitarian historicism which soon condemns every-thing out of tune with the prevailing ideologies. Indeed the coexistence of multiple value systems seems endemic to the late twentieth century and only in this sense could the postmodern be defined as a necessary condition.

Some of the most succinct definitions of modernism and postmod-ernism within recent musical culture come from Georgina Born’s study of the Parisian research centre, IRCAM.^ Born associates modernism with a variety of new aesthetic movements dating from the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, all linked by their common reaction against prevailing classical and romantic currents. Its formalist bias car-ries with it an interest in technology and science, the futurists being the most extreme modernists, embracing ever-new sounds from the modern world (pp.–). Associated with this is an unprecedented interest in music theory and the concept of a theoretical text preceding the act of composition. While many modernists might be politically neutral they have often sought to shockofficial establishments and bourgeois audi-ences and have thus engendered an association between modernism and radical politics. Their main imperative is towards progress and constant innovation (p.), keeping ahead of current tastes and subverting the sta-tus quo. What is particularly complex about modernism, in Born’s view, is its oscillation between the seeming opposites of rationalism and irra-tionalism, objectivism and subjectivism (p.), intensifying two strands of nineteenth-century art, positivistic naturalism and late romanticism.

Finally, modernism’s ambiguous relationship with popular culture stems

At the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism 

from the fact that both flourished simultaneously and that modernism’s move towards formalism and abstraction has taken it progressively away from a direct association with popular culture. In fact, popular culture has become the ‘other’ of modernism, ignored, reviled or, occasionally, envied and appropriated.

At a glance, these features of modernism would seem to sit rather awkwardly in relation to HIP; to be sure, the latter has often been a re-action against prevailing currents and tastes in performance, and it has often attempted to shockthe establishment (see p. above), but it hardly seems to embrace technology, progress or the new for its own sake. In-deed, it has been a decidedly anti-modernist movement, searching for the pre-modern and rejecting many of the ‘advances’ of nineteenth-century instrumental technology. Moreover, HIP would hardly be a welcome guest within most modernist circles since the typical modernist narrative of art history would discount any reversion to an earlier form of art as

‘beyond the pale’ of history proper.^

Nevertheless, the interest in historical data and ‘authentic’ musical notations as a prerequisite for performance may well relate to the mod-ernist imperative of negating a more recent past. Most importantly, the development of reproductive sound technology has itself enabled HIP to enjoy immense success, broadening access to forgotten repertories and allowing unstable or nearly unplayable instruments to be heard to their best. In sum, if HIP cannot be directly related to the mainstream of modernism, many of its beginnings and presuppositions could not have arisen outside a modern culture. As the movement has come of age, cer-tain modernist traits, particularly the cult of ‘newness’, have undoubtedly become rather less relevant. After thirty years of constant publicity, HIP no longer shocks us in the way that even The Rite of Spring continues to do.

Born associates postmodernism with movements in literary and archi-tectural criticism that arose in thes and seventies onwards, move-ments that in some degree experienced dissatisfaction with modernism.

It might attempt to counter the traditional division between high and low culture by advocating a new sense of cultural pluralism. It might also turn away from modernism’s negation of earlier ‘languages’ of art (e.g.

realism, narrative and, specifically in music, tonality), precisely by reap-propriating these earlier modes (as in ‘neoromanticism’). As Born notes, both these negations of modernism are themselves ironically dependent on a modernist tendency towards negation. Postmodernism must thus be seen as something that preserves discursive continuities with modernism, some of these continuities being themselves defined by negation (Born,

 Culture of the late twentieth century

Rationalizing Culture, p.). This view is substantiated by an ‘arch’ post-modernist, such as Lyotard, who insists that the postmodern is ‘modern’

to the extent that ‘All that has been received, if only yesterday. . . must be suspected’.^

Born defines this bundle of postmodern tendencies as ‘populist’ and links it to a less visible ‘vanguardist’ position, which rejects ‘the predom-inantly asocial and formalist, pedagogic and elitist cultural politics of modernism’ (Born, Rationalizing Culture, p.), together with the mod-ernist belief in the autonomy of the aesthetic. The ‘vanguardist’ position preserves the specifically modernist notion of a critical avant-garde that promotes many political movements associated with minorities and cul-tural diversity; it finds one of its most pervasive definitions in Lyotard’s

‘postmodern condition’, which celebrates the end of the grand mod-ernist narratives (including humanism and Marxism) and heralds an age of heterogeneity, dissent and local traditions (Born, Rationalizing Culture, p., and see p.  below).

With its doubling negation of modernism’s original contempt for past aesthetic conventions, Born’s populist postmodernism resonates imme-diately with many of the ideals of HIP as the latter also moves towards overcoming the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in a number of ways. First, there is the obvious way in which vast tracts of earlier musi-cal repertoire, ignored or simply unknown by the central musimusi-cal institu-tions, have been recovered in new ediinstitu-tions, performances and recordings.

Secondly, there has also been an emphasis on re-establishing local tra-ditions, whether large and national (e.g. William Christie’s seemingly single-handed re-establishment of French Baroque musical drama) or more regional (e.g. Jordi Savall’s Catalan interests).

Secondly, many HIP performances of works from the western canon seem purposely to have countered the reverential attitude associated with traditional twentieth-century performance: Reinhardt Goebel might perform certain well-known movements by Bach at such a fast tempo that it almost parodies the ‘geometricism’ Taruskin observes in modernist performance;^ performances of Beethoven symphonies by Christopher Hogwood purposely aim for the amateur matter-of-factness that he be-lieves belonged to the first performances.^This approach seems to link backto the postmodern tendency to breakdown the division between popular and elite artistic expression (HIP bringing with it, ironically, a new ‘elite’ body of historicist dogma).

Performers within HIP will disagree as to whether their movement promotes more or less virtuosity than the mainstream but it is obvious

At the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism 

that at least the pioneer performers of HIP did not place progressive technical proficiency at a premium (historical spirit, textual and stylistic accuracy were generally more important, see p. above). Certainly, with a greater interest in ornamentation and improvisation, different forms of virtuosity have been developed. But there is an obvious sense in which many historical instruments and their copies were not designed with the same stability and dependability as their more modern equivalents.

The benefits and disadvantages of non-equal keyboard temperaments parallel and exemplify a general characteristic of earlier, pre-industrial instruments: it is a system in which certain intervals are acoustically pure at the expense of others, thus preventing a consistent average standard of accuracy across the range (in which, on the other hand, none of the intervals other than the octave would be acoustically pure). The HIP sen-sibility seems thus to reflect a pre-modern notion of hierarchy, although only the most brazen homology would suggest that this represents a nostalgia for the feudal (see pp.– below).

Some of these attitudes within HIP – such as those that promote a local culture, or the music of women composers – also seem to approach Born’s vanguardist position. There is the common notion that HIP performers are turning their backon the rat-race of mainstream performance, that they are to some degree counter-cultural. They might breakdown the usual division of labour by playing some part in the making and main-taining of instruments, and by cultivating the historical knowledge of the performing practices. Whether this is ever true in practice is, of course, another matter; a comprehensive course in historical perfor-mance is, after all, far from the norm in educational institutions and many players do little more than impersonate the supposed HIPness of their elders, as Michelle Dulakhas observed. The increasing professionalisa-tion of HIP is also difficult to ignore with performers ever more likely to adopt traditional concert dress and signing up with professional concert agencies.^

Using Born’s definitions, then, it would seem that Taruskin’s mod-ernist definition of HIP is misplaced. He may be quite correct in per-ceiving modernist elements, but these are reused and realigned in a way that is typical of the postmodernism that Born outlines. Nevertheless, further reading of both authors shows that they have radically differ-ent conceptions of how modernism and postmodernism should be ap-plied to twentieth-century western musical culture. Born sees the Second Viennese School as the central bastion of musical modernism, with serialism ‘for some decades the organizing force of musical modernism’

 Culture of the late twentieth century

(Born, Rationalizing Culture, p.). She goes on to identify two rival ten-dencies of thes and s which – while part of a broader, eclectic modernism – she considers to demonstrate a ‘proto’ postmodernism.

On the one side, there is the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith which attempted to reinvigorate the present with materials and prin-ciples from earlier centuries; on the other, the appropriation of urban and folk-based popular musics by composers ranging from Debussy and Bart´okto Gershwin and Vaughan Williams.

Born’s view of the Second Viennese School as the central impetus for musical modernism becomes even more plausible as she begins to describe its hegemonic status for the leading European and American composers after the World War II. During thes many composers sought to extend serialism to all other parameters of composition and became concerned with other tools of rationalism, such as mathemat-ical and acoustmathemat-ical research and technologmathemat-ical developments. This pe-riod engendered the archetypal modernist union of music theory and composition, often researched and produced by the very same person (p.).

Born sees the counterpoint between modernism and postmodernism as beginning around thes and continuing throughout the remain-der of the century, ‘a continuous and centripetal antinomy, a kind of mobile stasis’ (p.). Thus she seems to imply that there is no essential breakin the lates and s, at the point when the first theories of postmodernism were formulated; to her these are presumably describing and theorising situations, movements and tendencies that, in some cases, had been around for several decades.

Taruskin, on the other hand, tends to follow more the time-line of the theorists of postmodernism and see virtually everything before the

s (and much after, to his distress) as symptomatic of modernism.

If there is a central tradition of the modern, he believes this to be centred around Stravinsky (something, incidentally, substantiated by Schoenberg’s own reference to Stravinsky as ‘little Modernsky’).^Only when composers and performers take note of audience interests and concerns, only when the political nature of music is openly and consis-tently acknowledged is the tyranny of modernism finally overcome (see pp.– above).

Already it has become clear that this chapter cannot quickly draw to a firm conclusion by proclaiming the movement of HIP to belong to either a modernist or a postmodernist culture. These terms themselves need to be examined afresh together with the very phenomenon they are meant

At the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism 

to illuminate, HIP. And this, the object of study, will in turn influence the way the categories are defined and employed.

D E F I N I N G M O D E R N I S M

‘So cold and optimistic, modernism. So sure it will get there eventually’

(T. J. Clark)^

In the widest possible sense, modernity is a concept that can be traced backto the Renaissance or to the onset of modern rationalistic thought during the seventeenth century.^ Some see a more definite beginning with the Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a movement that instigated a project of human development and self-realisation that, to some, is not yet complete.^ Whatever the outer bounds of modernity, modernism, as a specific cultural movement is usually dated to the last decades of the nineteenth century, thenceforth dominating much of the twentieth century (at least so far as cultural ide-ology is concerned). ‘Modern’ in this sense implies particular defining characteristics and ‘does not merely mean “the most recent” ’.^

While T. J. Clarksees the roots of modernist art in the French Revolution itself, he suggests that it also stopped with the Revolution and began again at subsequent times of revolution (Clark, Farewell to an Idea, p.). To him ‘modernity’ is a slow, agonising recognition of contingency in the order of the human world, a progressive movement towards ‘dis-enchantment’ (that expression first formulated by Max Weber)^ which engenders desperate attempts to create order (often with totalitarian regimes). Material and economic factors progressively rule human af-fairs, thus rendering tradition and its rituals redundant; so modernism is the desperate response to the very visibility of Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’, revelling in its own technique as a surrogate for truth (Clark, Farewell to an Idea, pp.–). The utopian element of modernism lies in its doctrinaire insistence on showing us the contingency of our beliefs and comforting modes of representation, but at the same time pointing towards some future natural order – a totality – that is ever on the verge of discovery.

Thus, if modernism by its very nature turns its backon history, it still carries with it a sense of historical destiny, of a process yet to be completed.^Zygmunt Bauman suggests that all residents in modernity are nomads who intend to settle but who are ever frustrated just as the final corner is turned, aspiring residents ‘without a residence permit’.

 Culture of the late twentieth century

If the pre-moderns tended to go round the same tracks time and again, the moderns always followed new tracks, but tracks that they had laid only momentarily before.^

Much recent musicological literature tends to view modernism as a consistent dogma based around objectivism, positivism, geometricism, depersonalisation and the separability of the aesthetic realm from all other aspects of life. While all these elements have at some point been relevant to modernism, they are by no means the only characteristics and, indeed, stand diametrically opposed to other elements of the ment. Moreover, if this modernist caricature is applied to the HIP move-ment there is unlikely to be more than the most superficial association since the depersonalised and autonomous view of art is fundamentally anti-historicist. Some of the more extreme modernists, Marinetti and Le Corbusier, for instance, were quite strident – to say the least – in their negation of history or the historicist stance. Modernism also tends to stress technique at the expense of the representation of ‘reality’, idea or mood, and thus lays a tremendous premium on competence and high technical achievement (Danto, After the End of Art, p.). This again runs against the ‘traditional’ HIP view that virtuosity is not the prime aim of musical performance and that, indeed, a more amateur or ‘routine’

approach may not be without its advantages.

Thus, it would seem, HIP is fundamentally opposed to this caricature of modernism, however much it might borrow some of the cultural trappings of the movement (such as playing in time). Taruskin cleverly suggests that HIP is, in fact, more modernist than historical, that its pretensions to historicism are merely a smoke screen for a thoroughly modernist aesthetic. But, however true this may be, it does not account for why the smoke screen of history came to be applied in the first place;

why do the ‘modernists’ of HIP need the excuse of history? It would follow

why do the ‘modernists’ of HIP need the excuse of history? It would follow