Public music-making in the eighteenth century was essentially a sociable and an urban activity, with singing to be encountered in the streets, in theatres, concert rooms and churches, as well as in the drawing rooms of the wealthy. At the end of the seventeenth century there was still a recognised division between ‘gentlemen’, who made music for their own pleasure, and masters, ‘who are to earn their support by pleasing not themselves, for it is their day labour, but others’, as Roger North put it. This socio-musical distinction is one of the defining aspects of the period, but by the early years of the nineteenth century the line between gentlemen and players was less distinct; there was an international opera circuit, institutionalised music teaching, and a popular engagement with singing and singers that would have been unrecognisable to the dilettante of a hundred years earlier. The period saw some of the most important developments in the history of singing; the castrati came into their own and continued to represent the acme of vocalism even as great women soloists established themselves as serious competitors. It was the age of the first star tenor soloists – not the power performers that we now associate with the voice, but lyrical singers, often taught by castrati, who exploited their head register to take them to great heights. Twentieth-century music history identified two distinct eighteenth-century periods – the Baroque and the Classical – but in practice the developments in composition meant very little to singers, whose freely creative contribution to the art of performance was probably greater than at any time before or since. There is some evidence that the Renaissance ideal of separate performance styles for church, chamber and theatre continued on into the eighteenth century, but the differences between them were increasingly of scale rather than substance (and the aristocratic ‘chamber’ increasingly gave way to the bourgeois drawing room).

In July 1940, Simone de Beauvoir began a routine of going to the Bibliothèque Nationale most days from 2.00 to 5.00 p.m. to read G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Hitler's armies had invaded and occupied Paris earlier, on June 14, 1940. She was teaching philosophy classes at a girls' lycée and living in her grandmother's empty apartment. Her close companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been a soldier in a meteorological unit of the French Army, had been captured and was now being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Beauvoir was relieved to receive a note from him sent on July 2 saying he was being well treated, but life in Paris was dismal. Food was scarce, and the German troops were grim reminders of Parisians' lack of political freedom. Her reading routine helped soothe the dread, isolation, and alienation she felt. Beauvoir had always been a very earnest student. She had passed the demanding aggregation exam in philosophy at the young age of twenty-one. To supplement her knowledge of classical philosophical texts, she learned German and read texts in phenomenology. In 1935 she had read Edmund Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness “without too much difficulty.” She also read Heidegger and translated long passages into French for Sartre. Back when she was in college, her prodigious work habits had earned her a special nickname among her friends: Castor, or the beaver. Poring over a difficult philosophical text in a foreign language for three hours a day might seem a strange way to get through such times, but with her it made sense.

This remarkable observation would have astonished earlier generations of musicians. In all likelihood it would have astonished Beethoven and most of his contemporaries as well. The idea that a composer could not be equally skilled as a performer was at the beginning of the nineteenth century revolutionary. Pleyel's comment, however, is representative of a shift of perspective in many aesthetic considerations during this period. It signals the beginnings of a century-long transition towards a separation of the roles of composers and performers, when the very nature of their relationship changed at a rate unprecedented in history.

This chapter will address this relationship by examining the perceived self-identity of composers and performers, the leadership of ensembles and the changing views regarding so-called ‘fidelity to the score’. It will also survey relevant performance issues which inform this relationship, such as improvisation, tempo and rubato, focusing on increased notational specificity introduced during the nineteenth century.

Communication and collaboration

The composer–performer relationship, at once both intimate and remote, is certainly among the most remarkable phenomena in Western music. Co-creators, like actor and playwright, choreographer and dancer, composer and performer have long collaborated fruitfully, but at the same time the relationship has been fraught with tension and potential misunderstandings.

EXISTENTIALISM, EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY, AND EXISTENZ-PHILOSOPHY

There can be no doubt that Nietzsche figured importantly in the genealogy of existentialism. Along with Kierkegaard, he is commonly considered to have been one of its fathers – or perhaps grandfathers, if its paternity is to be attributed to Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. An argument can certainly be made that Kierkegaard deserves the characterization “existentialist,” his passionate Christianity notwithstanding; for he virtually defined the program of the movement with his famous criticism of “modern philosophy” (that is, Hegel) for “having forgotten, in a sort of world-historical absent-mindedness, what it means to be a human being … each one for himself,” his insistence that “If [one] is a human being then he is also an existing individual,” and his contention that a human being does best to “concentrate his entire energy upon the fact that he isan existing individual.” But is the reinterpretation of human reality that Nietzsche calls for, and undertakes, to be understood at all similarly?

Music of the Baroque era has occupied a special place in the drive towards ‘authentic’, ‘period’ or (so current parlance prefers) ‘historically informed’ performance. HIP is, of course, hip, and has been for a long while; it is also a source of some anxiety, and not just from a more conservative cast of performers anxious to preserve their own hard-earned traditions. While HIP might in principle extend across all repertoires, its central tenets are usually deemed less relevant to music somehow closer to our own time. Therefore, if perhaps the greatest composer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), was the ‘creator of modern music’, so Leo Schrade famously styled him in 1950, then his operas, sacred music and madrigals might not need the benefit – or the crutch – of HIP to convey their messages. Likewise, if Bach and Handel mark the start of the so-called ‘common practice’ period deemed essential to the music-theoretical training of any musician, then their music presumably speaks to all times independent of how authentic its performance. Nor is this ‘presentist’ (universalist, transcendentalist) stance annulled by the ‘historicist’ arguments often adduced in favour of HIP: that period performance brings the music somehow back to what the composer intended (which succumbs to the intentional fallacy), or to how it might have been heard in its time (but we are not authentic listeners). Further, advocates of HIP can easily be accused of opportunism (for commercial gain), escapism (from the dreaded musical avant-garde) or even just the exotic Ye-Olde-Tea-Shoppe fakery of the heritage industry. But although postmodernism has thrown a spanner in the works – so my previous remarks suggest – the battle for HIP has been fought and rightly won in many musical environments. Moreover, few can deny that its best exponents have the virtue of making old music sound fresh, vital and even new. While this might seem a convenient paradox, it is a laudable enough aim for any repertoire.

THE EXISTENTIALIST “FAMILY”

Most popular characterizations of existentialism – for example, “the metaphysical expression of the spiritual dishevelment of a post-war age” – apply at best to the cultural movement described in Chapter 3 of this Companion. While some of the concerns of existentialist philosophy – such as the significance of death or the scope of individual moral responsibility – may become especially urgent under certain historical conditions, they are perennial ones, without date or place. Still, those popular characterizations have the advantage that no one denies the reality of the cultural phenomenon they describe – one captured on film, in memoirs, and still present in the memories of elderly people who, in their youth, were right there and experienced it. A set of young people really did, as Simone de Beauvoir recalled, label themselves “existentialists,” wear an all-black uniform, frequent the same cafés, and assume an air of ennui.

The reality of existentialism as a philosophical movement, by contrast, has sometimes been doubted. It has been denied, that is, that there ever was a distinctive philosophical perspective or tendency shared by those thinkers who have been labeled “existentialists.” Thus Paul Ricoeur, in the course of repudiating Søren Kierkegaard's reputation as “the father of existentialism,” asserts that “the supposed family of ‘existentialist’ philosophies never really existed,” so that there was nothing for Kierkegaard to have fathered. The only reason that Ricoeur gives for this verdict – that the “family” soon “collapsed” – is, however, inconsistent with it.

The first problem confronting anyone interested in medieval music performance is the sheer size of the Middle Ages. By far the longest period of Western European music history, it spans the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. It is difficult to generalise about a millennium of music-making. Major differences exist, for example, between a lament from Carolingian Gaul and a lute composition from fifteenth-century Italy. These two pieces differ dramatically in almost every respect, including their temporal, geographical, linguistic and social contexts. Another problem is the remoteness of the Middle Ages. From the Baroque period, for example, we have a wealth of performance treatises, printed music, musical instruments, and in some cases, letters and musical sketches from the hands of composers themselves. Very little to none of this sort of documentation survives for the medieval millennium. This is due not only to the fact that the majority of music was transmitted orally rather than through writing, but also because most of the music written down in the Middle Ages – on perishable surfaces such as wax tablets or parchment pieces – has not survived. To make matters worse, medieval music writers, trained as they were in the speculative tradition of Boethius, generally refrain from detailed performance descriptions or prescriptions. Nevertheless, some knowledge survives on medieval music performance, and research continues to improve current understanding of the many kinds of music made in the Middle Ages, on which the present chapter proposes a thumbnail sketch.

Between 1430 and 1600 performance practice for instrumental musicians turned on its head. The watershed development for players (and of course for music in general) was the arrival of a compositional approach which was based on the notion of through imitation as the basic texture. This took place just before 1500, and after this the ground rules for performers changed fundamentally. The purpose here will be to trace the course of how these changes played out. With the key date of 1500 providing the frame of reference, this study will divide into two parts. The first considers the development of the instruments, ensembles and performance techniques of the fifteenth century. This span in essence may be viewed as a culmination of medieval traditions. The second takes up what followed in the sixteenth century, a period in which tradition and innovation time and again came into sharp conflict.

Instrumental practices c. 1430–1500

Instrumentalists in the fifteenth century performed almost entirely without written music. Because they worked without music, their practices have remained veiled – but other sources, iconographical, theoretical and archival, tell us a great deal. We know that in the fifteenth century the tradition of the distinction of two categories of instruments (haut and bas, or loud and soft) held sway. The soft instruments were those with gentler timbres, the most important being the fiddle, the lute, the harp and the portative organ.

Evidence in musicology may be described, as in jurisprudence, as information discovered or provided in an investigation to establish conclusively the truth about something in question. It offers the vital raw materials for the progress of research in numerous musicological sub-disciplines, and it is especially important in performance for those who wish to recover knowledge and attempt to recreate a former sound world – and mostly without the benefit of any aural legacy from the period concerned. Such evidence takes a rich variety of forms, as illustrated by a memorial volume to Thurston Dart in which each contributor uses a particular type of source-study, creating a veritable ‘case-book of musical research’. Such diversity is also demonstrated in the present volume, especially in those chapters in Parts II–VII inclusive.

Most performers utilise the evidence of source materials to forge so-called ‘historically informed performances’, implementing technique, styles and tastes appropriate to the music and attempting to establish features of it that conventional notation does not detail – these may comprise anything from musica ficta provision to the determination of, amongst other issues, instrumentation, pitch levels, tuning, rhythmic considerations, specific and extempore ornamentation, articulation, accentuation, dynamic nuances and, in Baroque music, the realisation of continuo accompaniments. Authoritative interpretation of the evidence for this variety of performance issues requires detailed historical study, and the potential exists for a diversity of interpretations of the information acquired, as well as for more than one acceptable solution. And, of course, all the evidence in the world will never guarantee performances that are convincing and vivid.

At its world premiere, 24 March 1958, there would have been every reason to expect that future performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras would, at the very most, be extremely rare events. Gruppen should last for about twenty-five minutes – a relatively brief duration given the considerable instrumental resources which go into making it. The work is written for a total of 109 players. These include four flutes and one alto flute, three oboes and two cors anglais, an alto and a baritone saxophone, eight horns, six trumpets, seven trombones – five tenor, one bass and one contrabass – tuba and twelve percussion players as well as keyboard glockenspiel, celesta, piano, two harps, a large string section and an electric guitar. On its own this would be an orchestral line-up that could outpace even the excesses of some of the later Romantics, though here it is at the service of 1950s high modernism. But the most obviously and immediately demanding aspect of this extraordinary work is the splitting of this considerable range of performers into three roughly equal groups, each with its own conductor and placed to the front, left and right of the audience. This arrangement requires a space both large enough and with the flexibility to accommodate this highly individual orchestral disposition, which tends not to be most modern concert halls. Either an adaptable arena (and with a suitable acoustic) has to be found (let alone paid for) or an existing concert hall, if its architecture allows, has to be fitted out with some kind of temporary staging.

As a student in the lycée, the young Sartre did not show a serious interest in political theory or in practical politics generally. His natural tendencies were anarchic. But his close friend and classmate at the École Normale Supérieure, Paul Nizan, joined the Communist Party (PCF) at age twenty-three (a decision Sartre considered shocking [monstre]). Sartre's interests were more literary and philosophical than political at that time. He resisted the siren call of socialism, for example, that had turned the heads of many of his classmates at the École, including Raymond Aron. Eschewing party adherence, as he would the rest of his life, Sartre nonetheless was strongly opposed to colonialism, which he regarded as a sordid form of state takeover. Sartre harbored a basic egalitarian spirit from his early teens and, as he recalls, thought of the French control of Algeria whenever the injustice of colonialism came to mind (Cér., p. 478). As his life-long companion Simone de Beauvoir remarks, they showed little concern for politics after graduation and did not even vote in the critical general election of 1936 that ushered in the socialist program of the Front populaire. But even in those years, as Sartre assures us, his “heart was on the Left, of course, like everyone else's.”

STUDENT, SCHOLAR, TEACHER (1915–1939)

Although he came under the influence of the charismatic pacifist professor known as Alain at the Lycée Henri IV, Sartre's own pacifism seems to have been rather short-lived and superficial. By the time he entered military service during the “Phony War” of 1939–40, Sartre had all but shed those inclinations in the face of the Nazi attack. Still, in his War Diaries he records on several occasions the tension at play in his personal life between the Stoicism that had attracted him in college, which Sartre associated with Alain’s pacifi st arguments, and his personal quest for authenticity.

Richard Wagner (1813–83) was opera's most revolutionary figure. Dissatisfied with existing conditions and standards, he articulated his aspirations for the genre in numerous essays and introduced several reforms, eventually establishing the Bayreuth Festival (1876) specifically for the optimum performance of his works. Tristan und Isolde (1856–65) represents the quintessence of his mature style, summing up his innovations in both theory and practice and achieving a true synthesis of words and music. This exploration of the agony and ecstasy of erotic love, with its pervasive tonal ambiguity and restless chromaticism heightened by suspensions, unresolved dissonances and sequential variation, changed the course of music history, exercising a potent influence on succeeding generations of composers; more than any other work it symbolised the end of one era and the start of another.

Genesis: theory into practice

After the completion of Lohengrin (1848) Wagner composed no more music until his sketches for Das Rheingold (1853). The years between, though troubled ones (he was exiled from the German states until the early 1860s), were not creatively fallow. He contemplated his planned operas: Siegfrieds Tod (eventually Der Ring), Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Parsifal, as well as others eventually abandoned, and he wrote essays to explain why and how dramatic music should be developed from traditional ‘grand opera’ to what he termed ‘music drama’. These essays proved to be convenient progress benchmarks for him, even though, in the creative event, he sometimes bypassed them.

In 1549 the young Francisco Guerrero returned to his native Seville as a contralto singer of the cathedral. He remained there until his death in 1599, serving as assistant chapelmaster and (from 1574) chapelmaster. Seville Cathedral, the largest Gothic church in the world, dominated the musical life of a city and region enjoying a golden age both economically and culturally, given its central role in trade with the New World. Indeed, the cathedral's liturgical and musical practices influenced those of many New World churches. This chapter considers musical performance within two liturgical contexts at the cathedral: the Marian Salve service and Vespers of a high-ranking feast. It examines how various types of polyphony and instrumental music were deployed in these contexts, taking elements of Guerrero's output as specific examples. This selection allows the reader to draw some comparisons with the repertoire discussed in Chapter 19 of this book, namely Monteverdi's Marian Vespers music published in 1610. More generally, the influence of Seville Cathedral and the broad dissemination of Guerrero's music nationally and internationally lends wider relevance to some of the performance issues raised here, as does the degree of common musical practice among Iberian churches.

The provision for vocal and instrumental music at Seville Cathedral was of a lavishness designed to reflect the magnificence of the cathedral, in competition with Toledo, the primatial church of Spain. In 1587, Alonso Morgado commented that ‘the music and the choir, both of voices and of instrumentalists, shawms, trombones, bassoon, recorders, cornetts, and all instruments, can compete with the finest in Christendom’. This musical establishment encompassed several (and in some cases overlapping) groups of personnel.

The Earl of Chesterfield's precept signals the disjuncture between the concepts of music and musical performance as perceived by a British aristocrat in the mid-eighteenth century: listening to music is something a nobleman might do and enjoy without compromise to his station in life, but to participate in its performance is to invite social stigma. And Adam Smith could observe that to work as a professional performer was a ‘sort of public prostitution’, and the ‘exorbitant rewards’ paid to the most admired players and opera singers both reflected the rarity and beauty of their talents, and compensated them for the social ‘discredit of employing them in this manner’. But Smith's prediction that any lessening in society's prejudice against performers would lead to a corresponding diminution of their earning potential was to prove very wide of the mark; it stands now as an indication of just how much the routine disparagement of performers and an accompanying ambivalence towards music's cultural standing was to change. For not only was nineteenth-century Britain to prove one of the most lucrative earning grounds for superstar performers, but as a nation it also became serious about encouraging and training its own native performing talent, so as to be the better able to satisfy its appetite for music of all kinds.

The central inspiring theme of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical thought is, in a word, the body. It is difficult to state his core insight, however, without making it sound trivial. Everyone knows that we have bodies and that the body is essentially involved (somehow or other) in perception and action. But what does it mean to “have” a body, and how (exactly) is the body implicated in our experience and our behavior? What is its relation to us?

To begin with, notice how misleading it is to say that I “have” a body, as if my body stands in a merely external relation to me. Wittgenstein once wrote, “If someone says, ‘I have a body,’ he can be asked, ‘Who is speaking here with this mouth?’” Yet we also speak loosely (and harmlessly) of “having” minds, though it seems absurd to say that a mind is something distinct from the person whose mind it is. Especially under the influence of Descartes, or at least the popular appropriation of Cartesianism, we are probably more inclined to say that we are our minds. This is perhaps what we ought to say about the body, too, or at least what we ought to mean by saying that we have bodies: I don't merely have a body, I am my body. Even better, perhaps we ought to say that a body, like a mind, is an aspect of a person.