Rejected Traditions: Ensemble Placement in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.Few topics cause more of a stir in the musicological community than those concerning authenticity. What riles everyone up, it seems, are misplaced assertions made by many of those intimately associated with the so-called early music movement,1 who claim both that their performances represent a re-creation of history, and that the historical information on which such performances are based provide a sure foundation for an "authentic" performance that accurately reflects the composer's intentions of how a work "should" sound.The problem with this position is not just its tone of superiority but its fundamental in-credibility, something few commentators have dared to assert until fairly recently. The most powerful voice to stand up against this deception has been Richard Taruskin, whose passionate prose has upset the proverbial applecart by revealing just what the "authenticity" movement has and has not been up to.2 In his published collection of essays entitled Text and Act, Taruskin argues that so-called authentic performances do not reveal any concrete truth (certainly not of the sort claimed by their proponents, anyway) of how the music of earlier times "should" sound. Instead, he tells us, these performances reflect our contemporary taste for this repertoire's sound, and offer a twentieth-century interpretation that, while based on certain historical facts, is encumbered with the inherent biases that human beings of a different time and culture naturally bring to any interpretive endeavor.3Historical investigations and the interpretations they generate are particularly susceptible 19th-Century Music XXII/2 (Fall 1998). ? by The Regents of the University of California.