The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First

Century by Bruce Haynes

Review by: David Schulenberg
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 169-178
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society
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 Reviews 169

The End of Early Music: A Period Performers History of Music for the Twenty-
First Century, by Bruce Haynes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007. xix, 284 pp.

The premise underlying Bruce Hayness book is that a paradigm shift in how
musicians understand and interpret older Western compositions began during
the 1960s and 1970s. In thirteen chapters (grouped into five parts), Haynes
characterizes three broad currents in the performance of early music during
the twentieth century as Romantic, Modern, and Period (p. 32; the terms
are always capitalized). Against these Haynes postulates a Rhetorical style
that was prevalent during the eighteenth century. Haynes argues, with wit and
passion, that restoration of this Rhetorical style has made it possible for certain
present-day performers to achieve a type of historical authenticity. But the
meaning of this last term never becomes clear, and the argument is weakened
by haphazard organization, as well as an impoverished sense of what history is
and how it might relate to musical performance. Following the delineation of
the three styles in the first part, part 2 considers the changing relationships
between composers, works, and performance during the later eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. This section analyzes popular concepts of work
and performance and lays the ground for part 3 on Anachronism and
Authenticity. Part 4 delineates aspects of Baroque performance practice that
Haynes considers important for achieving Rhetorical style, and part 5 summa-
rizes the authors view that present-day performers of early music should
adopt what he considers authentic Rhetorical approaches, freeing themselves
from the continuing influence of Modern style.
Part 5 shares its title The End of Early Music with the book as a
wholeapart from the the quotes on early, which should not be dismissed
as scare quotes but rather as signaling that the word here has a special
meaning. But that meaning remains elusive, nor is it clear whether the double
entendre in the title is intended: is the end of early music its demise or its
purpose? Early music itself is never defined as a repertoire, discipline, or
culture, though it is each of these at different points in the discussion.
Chronologically, Haynes looks back no further than Lully, and the only
compositions considered in depth are ensemble works of the late Baroque,
particularly those of J. S. Bach. Haynes defines his three twentieth-century
performance styles mainly by association: Romantic style with canonism,
Modern style with strait playing, Period style with rhetoric. Strait play-
ing (from straitjacket) is a play on what Richard Taruskin called straight
style;1 a more or less synonymous expression is click-track Baroque, derived

1. Haynes cites Taruskin from a review reprinted as The Crooked Straight, and the Rough
Places Plain in Taruskins Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 31620where the reference is to straight performers, not
style.

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170 Journal of the American Musicological Society

from sewing-machine Bach.2 But were there exactly three twentieth-

century performance styles for early music? In what sense was eighteenth-
century performance rhetorical, and is the best current early-music perfor-
mance rhetorical in the same way?
Musicologists will be peeved by Hayness blinkered view of their discipline,
which he criticizes for the absence of whimsy and wit in the study of seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century music (p. 128).3 He sees historical musicology
as serving only to establish a foundation of verifiable history on which perfor-
mance practice can be constructed (p. 131). This is to equate history with a
set of facts, not the critical interpretation of evidence. Scholarly readers will be
equally troubled by the frequently imprecise references to earlier authors. For
instance, a statement about the interpretation of Bachs slurs is attributed to
Mendelssohn; following up a vague reference to a secondary source, one dis-
covers that Mendelssohns comment actually concerned Handel.4 This is one
of an enormous number of citations, most taking the form of endnotes that
comprise little more than author-date references. This system forces the reader
to turn first to the endnotes, then to the bibliographya significant inconve-
nience, given the large quantity of material that is quoted or paraphrased from
other authors.
On the other hand, Haynes advances beyond previous authors by includ-
ing seventy-two recorded illustrations, accessible as streaming audio files on
the publishers website. Many of these audio samples are integral to the dis-
cussion. Thus the three twentieth-century performance styles are represented
by recordings of Bachs Second Brandenburg Concerto directed by Stokow-
ski, Menuhin, and Harnoncourt, respectively (samples 8, 7, and 6). Tech-
nically, however, the audio clips leave something to be desired, beginning and
ending abruptly, without fade-ins or -outs. Each must be reloaded every time
it is hearda problem when one is trying to compare two or more examples.
Some of these samples are not what one would expect in a book on early
music performance. Declamation is illustrated through a sermon by C. L.
Franklin, father of singer Aretha Franklin (p. 171). The spontaneity that
Haynes considers essential to Baroque performance is exemplified by the
1937 improvisations of jazz musicians Stphane Grappelli, Eddie South,
and Django Reinhardt on Bachs Double Concerto (p. 149). Yet Haynes

2. Whether the latter goes back specifically to Sol Babitz, as Haynes indicates, is unclear. The
expression does occur in the article by Babitz that Haynes cites (p. 57, referring to Early Music
Laboratory Bulletin 11 [1974]), but it is on p. 28, not p. 8. Babitz also compared Wanda
Landowskas harpsichord playing to a sewing machine in a letter published in the New York
Review of Books (11 March 1965).
3. Haynes evidently reached this view after his attendance at the Fifty-Ninth Annual Meeting
of the American Musicological Society in Montreal, November 1993.
4. Haynes (p. 107) cites Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750
1900 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30ff. and 234 [sic]; only the lat-
ter page is relevant to Mendelssohns view.

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 Reviews 171

does little to relate these examples to the performance of older European

music. This failure extends beyond the audio samples. For instance, Haynes
quotes echoes of Cicero in eighteenth-century writingsthose not only by
the musicians Quantz and C. P. E. Bach, but also by the actor Jean Poisson.5
Like the Rev. Franklin, Cicero presumably declaimed his speeches in an effec-
tive, enflamed manner. But what that involvedthe technical means em-
ployed, how they actually sounded to their audiencesmust have been as
different from eighteenth-century acting and music making as the latter are
from twentieth-century preaching.
Other samples, however, are essential for understanding what Haynes
means by his three performance styles, which are hard to pin down even when
he lists their attributes. Those of Romantic style include portamento,
extreme legato, exaggerated solemnity, and controlled use of vibrato
(pp. 5152). Some of these features indeed characterize the early twentieth-
century recordings of Furtwngler and Mengelberg that Haynes cites. Yet, as
Teri Towe has pointed out, their tradition was only one of several inherited
from the nineteenth century.6 Whether their style is any further than a recent
Period style recording from achieving what Bach had in mind (p. 36) is es-
sentially a matter of definition. Both Mengelberg and the Akademie fr Alte
Musik Berlin recorded what Bach actually wrote.7 But the latters unnu-
anced, unornamented performance style may leave out something authenti-
cally Bachian that is present in Mengelbergs performance, despite his
anachronistic performing forces and leaden tempo.
Haynes faults English early music specialists as well as the American Joshua
Rifkin for performances that adhere to strait style. But I hear little funda-
mental difference in the approved Dutch performances of Bach that Haynes
juxtaposes with Rifkins (p. 111). A performance led by Ton Koopman reveals

5. Haynes (p. 174) cites Cicero from M. H. Abramss famous The Mirror and the Lamp:
Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1953), 71; the text in question reads: ut enim nulla materies tam facilis ad exardescendum est,
quae nisi admoto igni ignem concipere possit, sic nulla mens est tam ad comprehendendam vim
oratoris parata, quae possit incendi, nisi ipse inflammatus ad eam et ardens accesserit (For just as
no substance is so capable of catching fire, to produce flame without the application of flame [a
spark], so no mind is so prepared to grasp the power of a speaker, to be able to burn, unless the
speaker comes to that mind himself inflamed with passion); De orat. 2.190. Carl Dahlhaus, in
Si vis me flere . . ., Die Musikforschung 25 (1972): 5152, pointed out, in addition, a
Horatian parallel to the admonitions of Quantz and Bach: Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum
ipsi tibi (If you would have me weep, first you must grieve); Ars poet., 102.
6. Against Mengelbergs legendary performance of the Saint Matthew Passion Towe sets an
earlier one by Siegfried Ochs; see Present-day Misconceptions about Bach Performance Practice
in the Nineteenth Century: The Evidence of the Recordings, in A Bach Tribute: Essays in Honor
of William H. Scheide, ed. Paul Brainard and Ray Robinson, 22131 (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1993),
at 223.
7. The Akademie fr Alte Musik Berlin is represented by a sample from their 1995 recording
of Bachs Air on the G String (BWV 1068/2) (Harmonia Mundi HMX 2908074.77).

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172 Journal of the American Musicological Society

greater dynamic variation, but this is partly a matter of its audio engineering
and larger ensemble, and its online excerpt simply plays louder than Rifkins.
The differences between the recordings are real, but in none of Hayness Bach
clipsnot even one featuring his own playing (he has had a long career as
maker and player of early oboes)do I hear the unpredictability or spon-
taneity that he considers crucial to the Rhetorical style.
For Haynes, rhetoric is the key element that was lacking in Romantic,
Modern, and early Period performance. But an index entry for Rhetoric, de-
fined, takes one only to a definition of Rhetorical music, which is glossed,
not very helpfully, as music made when musical Rhetoric was valued and
used (p. 15). Hayness source for rhetorical as denominating a whole ap-
proach to music is Nikolaus Harnoncourt, whose 1982 collection of essays
and talks bears the title Music as Rhetoric.8 But neither author gives the de-
tailed analysis of musical texts and practices that would be necessary to
demonstrate that a Baroque work, or some way of performing it, resembles
actual verbal rhetoric.9 If a song by Machaut, Schubert, or Elliott Carter is any
less rhetorical than one by Lambert or Telemann, neither Haynes nor
Harnoncourt tells us how. Yet both authors imply that use of historical prac-
tices will insure that a performance of music by one of the two latter com-
posers will be somehow rhetorical. These practices presumably include the
devices of articulation and ornamentation that Haynes discusses in part 4;
familiar subjects in writings on Baroque performance, these are rhetorical
only metaphorically. Indeed, as Haynes writes, some things described by
Greek and Latin names that sound like diseaseshe mentions parrhesia,
the use of unfamiliar dissonancesturn out to be familiar Baroque orna-
ments, like the appoggiatura (p. 188). This is to admit that the rhetorical
aspect of such things is largely nominal.10
Looming behind Hayness Modern style is Taruskins idea of a literalistic
twentieth-century approach to performance heavily influenced by modernist
composition, especially Stravinskian neo-Classicism. But Haynes also delin-
eates a trend toward anti-Modernism in recent performances (p. 61); for

8. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Musik als Klangrede: Wege zu einem neuen Musikverstndnis; Essays
und Vortrge (Salzburg: Residenz, 1982), trans. Mary ONeill as Baroque Music Today: Music as
Speech; Ways to a New Understanding of Music (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1988).
9. Haynes does cite (p. 167) a work that includes just such an analysis: Patricia M. Ranum,
The Harmonic Orator: The Phrasing and Rhetoric of the Melody in French Baroque Airs (N.p.:
Pendragon, 2001). Harnoncourt mentions English funerals and French tombeaux of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries as instrumental genres modeled on a specific sort of rhetorical ex-
ercise, here the funeral oration (Grabrede); the idea was subsequently fleshed out in Clemens
Goldberg, Stilisierung als kunstvermittelnder Prozess: Die franzsischen Tombeau-Stcke im 17.
Jahrhundert (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1987).
10. On this issue, see especially Peter Williams, The Snares and Delusions of Musical
Rhetoric: Some Examples from Recent Writings on J. S. Bach, in Alte Musik: Praxis und
Reflexion, ed. Peter Reidemeister and Veronika Gutmann, 23040 (Winterthur, Switzerland:
Amadeus, 1983).

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 Reviews 173

Haynes, this bears out the familiar idea that Baroque performance had some-
thing in common with jazz. Parallels between the two styles, however, lie at a
high level of abstraction. It is easy to imagine that Baroque musicians some-
times performed with the exuberance heard in the Grapelli-South recording.11
But the latter reduces Bachs complex phrasing and harmony to a recurring
four-bar pattern, effectively converting a fugal ritornello form into a chaconne.
This is less startling than it might have been seventy years ago, now that it
has become commonplace for early-music performers to improvise actual
chaconnes. But such improvisation must be remote from what one heard in
eighteenth-century performances of music by Bach, or even Telemann.
It is probably no coincidence that twentieth-century composers were ex-
ploring improvisation at the same time that it became interesting to perform-
ers of early music. Yet Carter, explaining his decision not to incorporate
improvisation into his own compositions, reported: Ive always had the im-
pression of improvisation of the most rewarding kind when good performers
take the trouble to play music that is carefully written out as if they were
thinking it up themselves while they played it.12 Haynes admits as much,
observing that the best performers of written music give the illusion that they
are improvising (since to read mechanically is the kiss of death) (p. 209). For
Haynes, then, what really matters is that one not perform mechanicallylike
a trained bird, as C. P. E. Bach famously put it.13
For Haynes, Modern and early Period performance indeed was mechani-
cal, a failing that he traces to nineteenth-century canonism and the tyranny
of the conductor. Both evils are exaggerated, however. Haynes asserts that
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music was not meant to be heard re-
peatedly (p. 84). Yet Frescobaldis keyboard works and Corellis violin
sonatas were reprinted and copied into manuscripts for more than a century
after the first publication of each; were they any less canonic than were
Beethoven symphonies and certain Schubert songs for the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries? In some repertories, musicians surely did become tools of
a conductor who makes the players aware of the hidden intentions of the
composer as the German cantor Johann Samuel Petri put it already in the

11. Haynes identifies his audio sample no. 52 as the swing version, but it is actually a
portion of the Improvisation sur le Premire [sic] Mouvement du Concerto en r mineur de
Jean-Sbastien Bach recorded two days later; for a transcription, see Benjamin Givan, The
South-Grappelli Recordings of the Bach Double Violin Concerto, Popular Music and Society 29
(2006): 34151. According to Givan, the Swing Interpretation, released on the opposite side
of the same ten-inch disk, had disappointed the producer for the lack of improvisation involved; at
this writing it is accessible at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQZw3nema0Q (consulted
12 December 2009).
12. Allen Edwards, Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter
(New York: Norton, 1972), 78.
13. C. P. E. Bach, Versuch ber die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Berlin, 175362), i.3.7;
trans. William J. Mitchell in Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (New York:
Norton, 1949), 150.

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174 Journal of the American Musicological Society

late eighteenth century, in a phrase quoted by Haynes.14 Even more striking,

indeed chilling, is Petris statement in the previous sentence that each musician
in an ensemble plays like the mechanism in a clock, that is, like a machine.15
Evidently, at the time when mechanical musical instruments were an exciting
new technology, and playing in unison alongside professionals was probably a
thrill for the amateurs who frequently participated in late eighteenth-century
orchestras, being part of a clockwork mechanism was something a musician
might aspire to. But doing so was hardly new; disciplined playing by large en-
sembles had been made famous by Lullys band a century earlier, and by
Petris time it had spread to places like Dresden and Mannheim.
Although the nineteenth century doubtless did see changes in the relation-
ship between the individual musician and the larger ensemble, the idea of
Baroque music making as always involving active invention or spontaneity by
performers is problematical. Haynes exaggerates in his assertion that com-
posing through performancethe phrase is Lydia Goehrs16was the
dominant mode of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, improvisatory
and informal (p. 104). Embellishment, figured bass realization, and the like
might have seemed elements of composition or invention to a twentieth-
century observer, since they were less familiar than nineteenth-century prac-
tices that had come to be viewed as aspects of interpretation. But to realize a
figured bass in one of several possible ways is no less interpretive (and no
more compositional) than adjusting dynamic levels or phrasing; each is part
of the re-creation of a musical text within its respective tradition.
Hence it will not do to exaggerate differences between eighteenth- and
twentieth-century notation in Western music. Haynesusing terminology
that he seems to attribute to Nikolaus Harnoncourt, but which actually comes
from Charles Seegerdescribes musical notation in todays mainstream classi-
cal world as prescriptive, that of Rhetorical music as descriptive (p. 103).17

14. Auf die etwas knstlicher versteckten Absichten des Komponisten aber soll der Direktor
bey der Probe die Musiker aufmerksam machen, damit sie sie bald entdekken knnen. Johann
Samuel Petri, Anleitung zur praktischen Musik, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1782; repr., Munich:
Katzbichler, 1999), 181; quoted (p. 100) from John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the
Orchestra: History of an Institution, 16501815 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 386. Haynes, following Spitzer and Zaslaw, gives the word composer in the plural, not
the singular; he neglects to translate the adjective knstlicher, which could mean more artistic
but could also mean more artfulreferring to things that are merely clever, or perhaps notation
that contains tricky rhythms or unfamiliar performance indications.
15. Auerdem spielt der Musiker wie die Welle in der Uhr, das heit, wie eine Maschine.
Petri, Anleitung zur praktischen Musik, 181.
16. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 188.
17. Hayness source is Charles Seeger, Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing, Musical
Quarterly 44 (1958): 18495. Harnoncourt, Baroque Music Today, 2829, distinguishes
performance-notation from work-notation, the first corresponding roughly to what Seeger
might have termed the prescriptive notation of the present-day classical musician, the second to
the descriptive notation of older Western music.

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 Reviews 175

But Seeger approached the topic at a higher level of abstraction than Haynes
or Harnoncourt. Seegers point was that nearly all European musical notation
has been prescriptive, in the sense of telling the musician what to do (sing, play,
etc.), rather than describing the sounds actually produced. Baroque notation
cannot be interpreted without, as Seeger put it, knowledge of the oral (or,
better, aural) tradition associated with it. But the same is true of Brahmss
notation or, for that matter, the graphic scores that Cage and others were pro-
ducing just as Seeger was making his argument for the scientific transcription
of music of all cultures. Seeger pleaded for graphic notation that plotted pitch
and other acoustic parameters against time, yet no such system can specify
with precision such parameters as the use of the damper pedal or the perceived
dynamic level of a particular note produced in a given hall.
That musical notation varies in its degree of completeness or prescriptive-
ness is uncontroversial. But it does not follow that trying to reproduce the
individual composers personal intentions is a Romantic idea. Baroque com-
posers did not expect anyone to do that (p. 114, original emphasis). What
else could Mattheson have meant when he concluded his most famous book
with the observation that one who has not heard a composer performing his
own work may fail to understand it?18 Haynes supposes that the intentions of
Mattheson and his contemporaries were limited to aspects of general style, un-
like those of later musicians. But the distinction is murky, and Matthesons
comment echoes a much older one by the Duchess of Montbliard
Frobergers pupil and last patronto the effect that only one who had heard
the composer play it could satisfactorily reproduce his Mditation sur ma mort
future.19 How does this differ from the allegedly Romantic idea that the job
of the performer is to reproduce the individual composers personal inten-
tions, at least if by intention is meant how the composer performed a work
(or wished it performed)? Of course, Baroque works directed by the com-
poser, including Bachs church pieces and Handels operas, could change
from one performance to the next. But this means only that intention might
vary from performance to performance, or, to put it another way, that certain
works were defined rather loosely (they were open, in late twentieth-
century parlance). Is this situation special to Baroque music, or is it inevitable,
to some degree, in any notated composition? I fear that Haynes has missed the
point of Goehr and others whom he cites: it is not actual Romantic music that
somehow embodied fixed intentions, but rather it was a uniquely Romantic
idea, characteristic of the idealizing or essentializing strand in nineteenth- and

18. Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739; ed. Friederike
Ramm, Kassel: Brenreiter, 1999), 644.
19. Duchess Sibylla of Wrttemberg-Montbliard, letter of 23 October 1667 (2 November
1667, new style) to Constantijn Huygens, trans. in Rudolf Rasch, The Huygens-Froberger-
Sibylla Correspondence (16661668), in The Harpsichord and Its Repertoire: Proceedings of
the International Harpsichord Symposium, Utrecht, 1990, ed. Pieter Dirksen, 23345 (Utrecht:
STIMU, 1992), at 242.

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176 Journal of the American Musicological Society

early twentieth-century musical thought, that there could be such a thing as a

score that does this.
The issue of works and their notation shades into the question of authen-
ticity, which ultimately concerns the identity of what is being performed.
Haynes is not embarrassed to use the term authentic to describe musical per-
formances, but what he means by it is elusive. He considers it wrong to sup-
pose that Period [sic] musicking is meant to clone an actual concert that once
took place (p. 144). Yet some of the most illuminating performances of early
music have tried to replicate particular parameters, especially the performing
forces, of specific performances or venues: Handels 1754 Messiah at the
Foundling Hospital (recorded by Christopher Hogwood in 1980), Bachs
1727 St. Matthew Passion and 1733 Missa (recorded by Paul McCreesh in
2003 and Rifkin in 198182, respectively).20 Of course these were no more
or less authentic than those reenactments of Civil War battles that so engage
military-history buffs; some things doubtless accorded with what actually
happened, others not.
Haynes argues that Period instruments . . . have little direct effect on a
players stylistic approach to the music (p. 153, original emphasis). But how
does one distinguish a direct from an indirect effect? In fact Haynes regards
use of historical instruments as crucial for understanding early music, entitling
his chapter 9 The Medium Is the Message. As agreeable as it may be to as-
sert that authenticity is not a product of the instrument being played, but of
the musicians sense of style (p. 153), this becomes a tautology if authenticity
is considered, as Haynes does here, an attribute of performance style. In fact it
is hard to see how Rhetorical performing style could have been rediscovered
without, among other things, good replicas of Baroque oboes. On this sub-
ject, incidentally, Haynes regards Charles Rosen as arguing against old instru-
ments (p. 156). In fact, Rosen discovers a fundamental value in their use,
pointing to the questions that early music raises about certain assumptions un-
derlying mainstream performance: that there are no uncertainties about how
works have been meant to sound, that it makes sense to perform the entire
repertory using the same instruments.21

20. McCreeshs apparently was not the first OVPP (one-voice-per-part) recording of the
St. Matthew Passion, as Haynes claims (p. 131); various websites (e.g., http://americanbach.org)
list Jeffrey Thomass live performance, recorded during the 1996 Berkeley Early Music Festival, as
having been released in 2000 on the Koch International label. Whether the Kyrie and Gloria of
the B-Minor Mass were actually performed at Dresden in 1733 is uncertain; the Credo,
Sanctus, and Agnus Dei, also recorded by Rifkin, were later additions to the work, which Bach
never performed integrally.
21. See Charles Rosen, The Benefits of Authenticity, in Critical Entertainments: Music Old
and New (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 211; the essay, a review of Kenyon,
Authenticity and Early Music, originally appeared as The Shock of the Old, New York Review of
Books (19 July 1990). A passage about translating the sound of the past into the new sounds of
contemporary instruments, which Haynes seems to attribute to Rosen (p. 156), is actually the

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 Reviews 177

Elsewhere Haynes makes authenticity an attribute not of performance but

of performer, as in the observation: Authenticity seems to be a statement
of intent (p. 10). Presumably, then, in calling his performances authentic,
Haynes expresses his own intent to make them historically accurate. This is
to return to the problem of the books title, to what Haynes means by history.
He quotes Collingwoods famous definition of historical thinking as inter-
preting all the available evidence with the maximum degree of critical skill
(p. 226).22 Yet Haynes concludes on the same page that our ultimate con-
cern is trying to approach historical performing (original emphasis). This is
to suppose that the truth is out there, somewhere, in the form of an unknow-
able but authentic performance of every work. But this is precisely the sort of
thing that Collingwood says historical thinking is not.
Doubtless many, perhaps most classical musiciansnot just early ones
take inspiration from the fantasy of recreating a lost original. Many listeners
probably think along similar lines, even if the more careful authors of program
notes and preconcert lectures avoid encouraging it. The fantasy is harmless so
long as there is no confusion between an imaginative artistic pursuit and the
actual doing of history. But Hayness essentialist notion of authenticity as an
ideal for early music introduces precisely that confusion. It also explains why
his discussion of authenticity leads down a tangent to an analog of Period per-
formance that he calls Period composition (p. 210). By this Haynes means
composing in historical styles, understanding the latter as fixed essences, ways
of writing that a present-day musician can adopt unproblematically. But
whereas he finds mid-eighteenth-century Berlin style and later German
styles (p. 213) in the purported compositions of one Giovanni Paolo
Simonettiactually by Winifred MichelI sense here the same stylistic
anomalies that have been found in Michels reconstruction of a fragmentary
work by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.23 Compositional styles in this sense are
the analytical constructions of music historians, just as performance styles and
styles of improvised embellishment are the inventions of musiciansno mat-
ter how historically informed.
In his concluding pages, Haynes writes of Period performance as a perpet-
ual revolution, borrowing a phrase used by Joshua Rifkin. For Rifkin, how-
ever, the expression was not merely a cheerful term (p. 221) for historically

latters paraphrase of something Robert Morgan had suggested. Rosen goes on to suppose that
musical composition is partly divorced from the actual realization in sound (211)but only
partly, and the revised version of the essay concludes that by taking the indefensible ideal of
authenticity seriously . . . our knowledge has been increased and our musical life enriched (221).
22. Robin George Collingwood, The Limits of Historical Knowledge, Journal of Philo-
sophical Studies 3 (1928): 21322, at 219.
23. See the review by Mary Oleskiewicz in Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Modern Language
Association 59 (2002): 16976, at 173. In a touch reminiscent of Nabokovs Pale Fire, the imagi-
nary composers Simonetti and Tomesini receive regular entries in Hayness index.

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178 Journal of the American Musicological Society

inspired performance. Rifkin continued: In this post-modern era, we are

tired of perpetual revolution, adding that revolution really has to be the
motor of the exercise if the exercise is to have any meaning.24 That is to say
that early music should involve a constant overturning of ideasincluding
ones ownabout how to perform particular compositions. Haynes fails to
convey the struggle that revolution implies in this context; the eggshells
that are broken are strongly held convictions that must be cast aside as one
discovers that fundamental facts, such as the presumed choral nature of Bachs
vocal works, have become falsified. Mere changing taste (p. 221) hardly
constitutes a revolution, which involves rather the type of paradigm shift that
leads one generation to value old performance styles where another disre-
garded them, or where recognition that there were old performance styles dif-
ferent from those of today leads to a contextualized understanding of the style
in which one was brought up.
Peter Walls has considered many of these same issues in another recent
book.25 Unlike Haynes, he makes no claims for the emergence of a new, au-
thentic style of performance during the last few decades, nor does he single
out early music as a site for developments in performance style, discussing
nineteenth- and even twentieth-century compositions as well. This does not
mean that Hayness hypothesis is wrong. But whether the advent of so-called
authentic performance involved something substantively new, even revolu-
tionary, in the way musicians and listeners understand music has become a
historical question. It could be settled only by historical research and interpre-
tation, by sifting and weighing evidence that would include not only recorded
performances but concert and record reviews, syllabi for conservatory and
university courses, and testimony from informants who participated in the
movement (or at least thought they were doing so).
Whatever its limitations as music history, Hayness book is valuable as testi-
mony for the views of one such participant. It will be useful to students of his-
torical performance practice and instructors of courses on that topic, not only
for its extensive quotations and audio samples but for its lively, provocative
style. Despite the reservations expressed above, this year I am using Haynes
alongside Wallsin my own teaching.

DAVID SCHULENBERG

24. Joshua Rifkin, quoted by Uri Golomb, Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance
and Reception: An Examination of the B Minor Mass on Record (PhD diss., Kings College,
Cambridge, 2005; online at http://edocs.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/volltexte/2005/3077/pdf/
GolombUri.pdf ), 128, who in turn cites Rifkin, in interview with the author, November 2002.
Golomb includes this under the chapter subhead The ideal of perpetual revolution.
25. Peter Walls, History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music (Woodbridge, UK, and
Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003).

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