Taruskin argues that the concept of historic authenticity in the performance of early music developed concurrently with modernism and shares its values. These musicians, as Richard Taruskin has written about Pablo Casals, “did not have to face the ‘modern problem,’ so memorably defined by Auden, in his great essay on Yeats, as that of being ‘no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it.’” Performers born in the late nineteenth century could simply exist in and excel in one style.
#BACH CHACONNE UPDATE#
As I’ll be performing the piece in 2016, I figured I should update the post and move it over to my Guitar Whisperer Blog, which I’m reserving for musical topics only.ĭuring my talk on “The Re-Imagination of Performance” at the 2009 Guitar Foundation of America’s International Convention and Competition at Ithaca College I tried to show that performers who came of age before the 1930s or 1940s exercised more freedom in their relationship to their scores than today’s performers do: these earlier performers inherited a tradition that saw no conflict between musical individuality and the realization of a composer’s “intentions.” Until the ubiquity of Urtext scores, there was no meaningful distinction between interpreting a piece of music and interpreting a composer’s intentions. Bach’s famous Chaconne from the Partita in d minor, BWV 1004, and Ferruccio Busoni’s more famous arrangement of it for solo piano. I’m interrupting my “Thinking About Practice” series to update a post I rattled off in August 2009 on my Pristine Madness blog about the relationship between Andrés Segovia’s guitar “transcription” of J.