Download is a matter of perpetual controversy. Should performers play in a way

Lucy Caplan
Sound Reasoning
Glenn Gould
and Historically Faithful Performance
T
he question of how to interpret music of the past
is a matter of perpetual controversy. Should performers play in
a way that recreates the music as the composer would have heard
it, or should they adjust to modern conventions? One point of
view, represented by longtime New Yorker music critic Andrew
Porter, advocates what is known as performance practice, a style
based on the premise that the most valuable performances aim to
recreate, as exactly as possible, the sounds the composer would
have heard (160). According to this theory, musicians should
follow a composer’s textual directions about tempo, dynamics and
other details of performance; in this sense, performance practice
aims for what may be called “historical fidelity,” in which an ideal
musical performance attempts to recreate, as authentically as
possible, the very sounds a composer intended. But other critics,
such as musicologist Richard Taruskin, counter that “authentic”
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performances do not necessarily have any greater aesthetic value
(74). Since musical performance necessarily involves a degree of
interpretation on the part of the musician, he argues, performers
should be able to interpret music freely, without feeling bound to
strict conventions. The debate between these two points of view
remains unresolved; indeed, it has only intensified as the music at
the center of the debate moves further into the past. The debate
over historical fidelity, in other words, becomes more difficult to
resolve as modern musical traditions become less similar to its
historical predecessors.
One iconic figure in the performance practice debate is the
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Gould, especially well-known for
his unorthodox interpretations of Baroque music, eschewed the
basic tenets of performance practice, delivering performances that
might be described as unambiguously inauthentic with respect to
a variety of musical conventions. His interpretations, particularly
to the ears of performance practice advocates, sounded unlike
those of any other performer; indeed, they did not even sound
much like Baroque music. Instead of adhering to the stylistic
and text-based conventions that performance practice focused
upon, Gould made musical choices based upon a highly personal
aesthetic philosophy. On a superficial level, this individualistic
approach would appear to have less historical fidelity than
performance practice; that is, it would result in performances
that are less similar to those of the past. However, when one
considers the historical context in which performance practice
originated, as well as the role that individualistic approaches have
played at other points in musical history, it becomes more difficult
to determine what constitutes historical fidelity. Performance
practice, though it purports to deliver what proponents call a
historically authentic interpretation, considers only a limited set
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of musical conventions. Gould’s approach, in contrast, embraces
the individualism that guided performance throughout much of
classical music’s history, and thus has its own form of fidelity to
the past.
O problem, is that it is a relatively new, development. Though its
ne paradox of performance practice and perhaps its essential
goal is to recreate the precise sounds a composer had in mind while
writing a piece, it does so from a decidedly modern perspective;
performance practice tries to represent the past by looking back
on it from the present. When the tenets of performance practice
first began to circulate in the mid-twentieth century, the vast
majority of performers were unconcerned with the historical
implication of their musical interpretations. Musical culture
focused largely upon a combination of premieres and Romantic
standard repertory. In such a setting, there was little appreciation
for or exposure to Renaissance and Baroque music, and therefore
little discussion emerged about what constituted a historically
faithful performance of a work (Coldwell, par. 4).
Around 1940, however, there was an enormous revival of
interest in this music, and it was this revival, along with the
development of musicology, that helped such discussions emerge.
Indeed, as Maria Coldwell has pointed out, the renewed attention
to Renaissance and Baroque music was in part a consequence of
the concomitant development of musicology, which sought to
study music in its historical context (par. 4). Scholarly interest
in historical musical performance in turn led to the formation of
many early music groups. These groups were unique not for the
music they performed, but for their performance approach: in the
words of Early Music America, an organization that promotes
awareness of performance practice in the United States, these
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groups attempted to “recreate the sound-worlds of earlier
times through the use of period instruments and techniques”
(Coldwell, par. 2). Paul Hindemith led an early music program at
Yale University starting in 1940, and groups such as the Boston
Camerata, formed in 1954, focused exclusively on performance
practice approaches to Renaissance and Baroque music (Coldwell,
par. 4). By the 1960s, performance practice was established as
an integral part of classical music culture, especially in North
America.
Glenn Gould’s career – he was born in 1932 and made his
concert debut in 1955 – therefore coincided with the rise of the
movement. His interpretations, accordingly, were often considered
and critiqued through the lens of performance practice. When
contrasted with performance practice conventions, Gould’s
interpretations seem all the more individualistic, even eccentric.
Whereas performance practice encourages strict adherence to
textual directions, Gould often departed from such markings.
Kevin Bazzana notes, for instance, that Gould might play a Bach
movement marked andante (a slow-to-moderate pace) at a tempo
closer to allegro if he felt that the faster tempo suited the music
better (160). He might even add ornamentation that was not
written in the original score of a work. These kinds of changes
to the original score prompted some advocates of performance
practice to describe Gould’s playing as “arbitrary” and “divorced”
(Schott 514). To these critics, Gould’s performances were
anything but authentic.
Indeed, advocates of performance practice were so obsessed
with “authenticity” and “originality” (Coldwell, par. 6) that
they even leveled their criticisms at the instruments on which
performers played. Andrew Porter, in a 1986 New Yorker concert
review, compared two performances of a Beethoven cello sonata,
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one of which took place on period instruments and one on
modern instruments:
Polite discussion followed [the performances], but
it was apparent to anyone with ears that Beethoven’s
music rang out more bravely, more beautifully, and in
better balance on the early instruments. In that direct
comparison, the modernized cello sounded chocolatecoated and the little Yamaha piano loud and coarse.
(142)
According to Porter, “anyone with ears” could hear the
values of performance practice. In this sense, the standards of
performance practice were important not only for their historical
significance, but for their aesthetic value as well. Whether such
standards were achieved with the use of early instruments or
through strict interpretation, Porter seems clear: historically
faithful performance sounded superior to the “loud and coarse”
version offered by modern instruments. Performances on early
instruments had more aesthetic value – they simply sounded
better. For advocates of performance practice, then, period
instruments were themselves essential in producing authentic
interpretations of music.
This brand of authentic interpretation, or historical fidelity,
also derived from adherence to the music’s textual directions,
because these are, for supporters of performance practice, the
best indicators of the composer’s intentions. Elements such as
dynamics, articulations and ornamentations – all the elements that
define musical style beyond notes and rhythms – give the music
a particular stylistic and historical connotation. In his review,
Porter goes on to write that because they ignore the ideas of
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performance practice, modern interpretations are “transcriptions,
in effect, in which Beethoven’s tone colors, textures, attacks,
and sonic durations are inevitably altered” (142-143). Porter’s
reference to “transcription” is significant because, in music, this
word connotes a kind of “departure,” in which a musician rearranges a composition for instrumentation different from what
the composer indicated. It implies, in other words, a significant
deviation from the original piece of music. Porter’s criticism,
by using this particular word, suggests that these musical reinterpretations carry about them a certain air of inauthenticity;
these “transcriptions” perhaps even distorted the original. To
advocates of performance practice, not only is the moderninstrument interpretation less aesthetically pleasing, but it also
deforms the composer’s original intentions. Porter would likely
subject Glenn Gould, who performed on a modern piano in an
unorthodox style, to similar criticisms. On both aesthetic and
historical grounds, Gould presented challenges for advocates of
performance practice.
As convinced as proponents of performance practice were
of the aesthetic and historical value of their musical style,
their dissenters were equally strong. Beginning in the 1980s, a
vocal critique of performance practice arose within the musical
community (Coldwell, par. 6). Richard Taruskin, a musicologist
and critic, was one of the first to challenge the performance
practice approach. In his 1984 essay “The Limits of Authenticity,”
Taruskin declares that “the word [authenticity] needs…to be
rescued from its current purveyors” (68). His criticism focuses
on two foundational claims of performance practice, namely
that it is truer to the composers’ intentions and that it is more
aesthetically pleasing. Taruskin points out that older musical
scores are not necessarily more accurate than their modern
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counterparts, so to assume that they are more authentic is a false
premise. Indeed, older publishers were notoriously sloppy about
translating a composer’s directions into published scores, so it is
unreliable to assume that an older score provides a more accurate
rendition of the composer’s wishes (Taruskin 72).
In addition, Taruskin asserts that most advocates of
performance practice “fail to make the fundamental distinction
between music as tones-in-motion and music as notes-on-page”
(70). Translating music from notes to sounds, Taruskin argues,
is already a form of interpretation. That is, music does not exist
merely as markings on a page, but rather as an interpretation of
those markings, and it is thus misguided to make performance
choices based solely on textual evidence. Whereas Porter claimed
in his New Yorker review that “Beethoven’s music rang out…
more beautifully…on the early instruments,” Taruskin suggests
that performance practice may yield musicians who passively
rather than actively read musical compositions. In a passive
interpretation, he writes, “the notes and rests are presented with
complete accuracy and an equally complete neutrality” (72).
Early music, in this context, can become “a positivistic purgatory,
literalistic and dehumanizing, a thing of taboos and shalt-nots”
(Taruskin 76). These terms may be extreme, but they do give
an idea of the intensity of the performance practice debate;
Taruskin’s concerns were shared to some extent by many critics
of performance practice.
H
Glenn Gould fit into this debate? He is certainly
more aligned with Taruskin’s point of view than with Porter’s,
but he does not fit exactly into either of these opposing camps.
The major limitation of Taruskin’s argument is that he does not
provide an alternative to performance practice. He is clear about
ow does
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what he does not want performers to do, but he does not present
any clear preferences among other stylistic choices. Gould,
rather than simply dismissing performance practice, provides
just such an alternative: a highly individual aesthetic philosophy.
His interpretations, which often feature unusual tempos or
ornamentation of his own invention, have their own guiding
principles, equally or more rigorous than those of a performance
practice approach. As Bazzana points out, Gould focused on
musical structure as a defining aspect of a composition, and in
order to communicate this belief, he often brought out unexpected
lines within a particular texture (14). His playing sounds more
horizontal than vertical, almost as if several pianists are playing
the different musical lines within a piece simultaneously.
It is important to clarify that Gould’s disagreement with
performance practice was an ideological one. It was not the
music of performance practice that Gould dismissed, but its
methods. Gould, like many of his contemporaries who advocated
performance practice, was deeply committed to performing
Renaissance and Baroque music. His debut recital program
included music of Bach and Orlando Gibbons, a Renaissance
composer, and in interviews he claimed, “Gibbons is my favorite
composer – always has been” (Cott 65). But he interpreted this
music not by attempting to convey exactly what these composers
would have heard, but rather through a more individualized
approach that included, among other choices, departures from
marked tempos and dynamics.
Gould’s aesthetic philosophy is perhaps best described
as “starting from scratch.” In other words, Gould looked at a
piece of music not as an assignment merely to translate the
markings on the page, but rather as an opportunity to create
a newly expressive interpretation. According to one of his
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biographers, Gould “was a musical explorer who revealed as
he created his own artistic path, noticing things on it that few
before him had ever seen because he observed and heard with the
eyes and ears of a child” (Cott 18). Instead of trying to imitate
previous interpretations of a particular work, Gould looked at
the music itself as a primary source. Bazzana writes: “He treated
all scores…as collections of pitches and rhythms with no firm
guidelines as to how they were to be realized in performance”
(37). Of course, the idea that music has “no firm guidelines” to be
found in scores is antithetical to performance practice. Instead of
focusing of the textual evidence of scores, Gould’s rejection of
these “firm guidelines” implies a purely aesthetic attitude toward
interpretation.
Although Gould did not let textual markings dictate
his performances, he also did not make musical choices in a
vacuum. Gould’s approach, if not “authentic” in the manner
of performance practice, was certainly historically informed.
Indeed, he immersed himself in both personal and historical
context for any piece he performed. Describing the pianist’s
rehearsal technique in a New Yorker profile of Gould, Joseph
Roddy writes that Gould “plays for hours, thinks about how to
play for just as many hours, studies scores, analyzes recordings
by other pianists, and reads critical commentaries; everything he
plays he records on tape, and he evaluates his own performances
thoroughly and critically” (60). The events detailed in this list
reveal that Gould’s performances were the result of a careful
study that took into account historical interpretations by both
performers and scholars. Whether or not one finds Gould’s
interpretations more aesthetically pleasing than others, it is clear
that his interpretations were guided by the thinking, studying,
analyzing, reading and evaluating that Roddy describes, all of
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which led to a meticulously crafted performance.
But the careful consideration behind Gould’s performances
did not placate many performance practice advocates. In a 1978
Musical Times review of Gould’s recording of Bach’s English
Suites, critic and historian Howard Schott wrote:
His highly imaginative readings of [Bach’s] English
Suites…frequently stray into out-and-out eccentricity.
Dynamics… most often seem arbitrary, divorced from
the logic of the musical structure…Ornaments are, to
say the least, treated very freely…taking none whatever
of what we know of the manner of their performance
in Bach’s time…Even Gould’s impeccable pianism and
very considerable sensitivity do not compensate these
disfiguring anachronisms sufficiently to make his
performances enjoyable, let alone convincing. (514)
On a purely subjective level, of course, Schott’s critique may
be valid. The extent to which he enjoys the recording is certainly
a matter of personal choice, but it should not be mistaken for an
objective value judgment about Gould’s interpretations. Indeed,
the subjectivity of his criticism underscores the impossibility of
objective standards that performance practice claims to uphold.
By attributing his dislike to “disfiguring anachronisms” that do
not relate to “the manner of their performance in Bach’s time,”
Schott does not acknowledge that historical fidelity can take
forms other than performance practice.
If critics like Schott do not acknowledge other forms of
historical fidelity, it is because proponents of performance
practice rarely mention that it is a relatively new tradition. Since
performance practice did not emerge until the 1940s, any debate
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over the matter should be considered in the context of older
historical traditions. Gould’s aesthetically based approach is
just that – part of a lengthy historical tradition of personalizing
music to suit a particular performer and situation. Before the
advent of performance practice, performance of early music was
just as dependent on the performer’s interpretation as any other
era. Gould was well aware of this tradition, and made a point of
aligning himself with it. In response to criticism of his use of
improvised continuo in a Mozart piano concerto, in which he added
improvised notes based upon its harmonic structure, Gould said,
“I didn’t do nearly enough continuo-izing…It’s [a] documentable
fact that Mozart himself made it up as he went along, we know
that. Not only that, he took it for granted that everybody else
would, too” (Cott 55). If Gould was right, improvisation, the
ultimate “personal touch,” was a central aspect of classical music
performance throughout the eighteenth century; Gould’s use of
it therefore fits comfortably with historical precedent.
And even after improvisation became less prominent
in classical music, a strong spirit of personal interpretation
remained. In an article on musical performance in the nineteenth
century, musicologist Leon Botstein describes a musical culture
that prioritized aesthetics and personal interpretation over rigid
adherence to a score; in such an environment, he writes, “the
creative and critical aspects of cultural authority…disappeared”
(132). Specifically, professional concerts, previously the main
component of musical culture, were supplemented by a variety
of amateur performance groups such as chamber-music clubs
and choral societies (Botstein 133). The purpose of these groups
was not to replicate musical performances at the highest level,
but rather to enjoy it on aesthetic terms. To this end, amateurs
often played transcriptions and simplified versions of famous
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works, some of which were published and some of which were
of their own invention. Professional musicians, too, began to
embrace transcriptions as a valuable and enjoyable form of musicmaking (Botstein 133). To a performance-practice advocate, of
course, this tradition would seem inauthentic; Andrew Porter, we
recall, even used the word “transcriptions” to deride a modern
performance. But personal interpretation, whether through
transcription, improvisation or any other form, has just as much
of a place in musical history as do carefully marked scores. The
“authentic” tradition which performance practice uses as a model,
then, represents just one manifestation of musical historical
tradition, not tradition in its entirety.
Gould’s choice to depart from the performance practice
tradition, therefore, does not mean that his interpretations
lack historical fidelity. After all, performance practice is not
inherently valuable; it is valuable only for the musical experience
it engenders. As Taruskin writes,
Old instruments and old performance practices are
in themselves of no aesthetic value. The claim of
self-evidence for the value of old instruments, like
the claim of self-evidence for the virtue of adhering
to a composer’s “intentions,” is really nothing but a
mystique, and more often than one can tell, that is the
only justification offered. (74)
While not all performance practice relies on “mystique,”
Taruskin raises an important question about the intrinsic
value of performance practice. No matter how meticulously a
performer follows a composer’s score, the audience’s experience
remains subjective. After all, a basic principle of any artistic
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creation is that its effect depends upon its audience. A piece
of music may possess intrinsic beauty and value, but it has no
lasting import unless an audience experiences and appreciates
it. The determining factor of this audience experience, it seems,
is missing from the ideology of performance practice. Times
have changed since the era of Renaissance and Baroque music,
and therefore audiences’ reactions to such music have changed
as well. A listener comparing interpretations by Gould and a
performance-practice pianist may find either performance more
or less aesthetically pleasing, and either reaction is entirely valid.
But the fact that the performance practice debate can so easily
devolve into a question of “relative validity” only underscores
the argument of its opponents: interpretation at all levels, from
the way a musician plays to how an audience listens, is integral to
the experience of a musical performance.
N
o matter what one’s subjective reaction to
Glenn Gould’s
interpretations may be, it is undeniable that Gould’s musical
and historical approaches to interpretation were strong. He
understood the music he played in an intensely individual manner,
one that started with observation of the notes and rhythms,
rather than an attempt to conform to preconceptions about a
piece. He based his musical decisions on aesthetic choices about
dynamics, ornamentation, and articulations, rather than relying
on the directions present in the score. And while performance
practice advocates might suggest that such a method is
inauthentic, Gould’s approach really harkens back to a variety of
older performance traditions. He recalls the eighteenth-century
tradition of improvisation in classical and Baroque music, as well
as the nineteenth-century tradition of personalized, performerbased interpretation. This approach necessarily preserves the
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personal, proactive role of the performer, rather than relying on
the passive receipt of information directly from the musical text.
In doing so, it is not only a more aesthetically sound interpretation,
but also one with its own form of historical fidelity.
While Gould’s interpretations do not replicate music of
the past as its composers would have heard it, their uniqueness
gives them a vitality that is often missing from performance
practice: a vitality that connects them to the present rather than
to the past. In today’s world, where classical music no longer
retains the prominence it once enjoyed, the individuality of
Gould’s interpretations perhaps makes them more interesting
to the contemporary listener. If performance practice, with
its emphasis on tradition, cannot provide that same interest to
audiences, can it still make music of the past relevant to the
present? Or is it just a form of nostalgia, recreating a musical
experience that is uninteresting to today’s audiences? Perhaps
Gould’s unconventional approach, paradoxically, is this music’s
key to immortality. Electing individual aesthetic choice over
prescriptive methods, Gould transcends the limitations of
performance practice, thereby placing himself in a much longer
trajectory of musical history and ensuring that the music of the
past continues to be relevant well into the future.
d
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Works Cited
Bazzana, Kevin. Glenn Gould: The Performer
in the Work. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997.
Botstein, Leon. “Listening through
Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert
Audience.” 19th-Century Music 16.2 (Autumn
1992): 129-145. JSTOR. Harvard U. Lib.,
Cambridge, MA. 10 Sept. 2009. <http://
www.jstor.org/stable/746262>.
Coldwell, Maria V. “History of the Early
Music Movement.” Early Music America.
2007. 10 Sept. 2009. <http://www.
earlymusic.org/what-early-music>.
Cott, Jonathan. Conversations with Glenn
Gould. Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1984.
Porter,
Andrew.
“Musical
Events:
AmeriGrove.” The New Yorker [electronic
version] 3 Nov. 1986: 138.
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Roddy, Joseph. “Profiles: Apollonian.” The
New Yorker [electronic version] 14 May 1960:
51.
Schott, Howard. “Record Reviews: Bach
English Suites. Glenn Gould.” The Musical
Times 119.1624 (Jun. 1978): 514. JSTOR.
Harvard U. Lib., Cambridge, MA. 10
Sept.
2009.
<http://www.jstor.org/
stable/959929>.
Taruskin, Richard. Text and Act: Essays on
Music and Performance. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
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