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

Do we ever stop to consider the philosophy behind our approach to performance other than acknowledging that we belong to a particular pedagogical tradition? My teacher studied with Segovia, your teacher's teacher studied with Galamian, and she can trace her pedagogical lineage back to Beethoven or even farther. More significantly though, we are products of our age, captives of the current performance style that rules our conservatories, stages, and recording studios. Or are we?

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of superb books devoted to historical performance practice, some very specific such as Ross Duffin's How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007) that examine the tree, whereas books such as Peter Walls' History, Imagination, and the Performance of Music (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2003) survey the entire forest. In the cleverly and intriguingly titled The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century, oboist Bruce Haynes views the entire landscape.

Bruce Haynes has made his mark as one of the world's finest baroque oboists, as an instrument builder, and as the author of several important essays on the recorder and oboe. His pivotal article, "Beyond Temperament: Non-keyboard Intonation in the 17th and 18th centuries" (Early Music 19, no. 3 [August 1991]: 357–81) demonstrated that woodwind players did and still can accommodate themselves to unequal temperaments. His other two books, The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy, 1640–1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), and History of Performing Pitch: The Story of "A" (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), firmly established Haynes's credentials as a performer/ scholar with the experience, perspective, and authority to assess where we have been, where we are now, and to suggest where to go from here. He writes with the joyful abandon of a pleasingly crusty warrior who is well beyond caring whether his strong opinions might offend some, and his direct conversational style is designed to communicate rather than impress. It entertains as well. Witty quips leap from the pages, and puns abound. For instance, Haynes quotes a colleague's rant lampooning performances that disregard HIP (Historically Informed Performance):

Historically Clueless Performance? Wild Guesswork Performance? Whatever Feels Right Performance? Whatever My Personal Hero Did Must Be Right Performance? Didn't Do My Homework So I'll Wing It Performance? Anything Goes Performance? History is Irrelevant Performance? Whatever They Did On My Favorite Recording That's What I Must Imitate Performance?

(p. 11)

Humor aside, Haynes provides an invaluable service by framing the issue of performance style in clearly defined terms that set the parameters for the broader discussion that must occur if classical music is to maintain, or as some would say, regain its stature as a relevant artistic force. Although Haynes covers a vast territory during the course of thirteen chapters, four main topics emerge: the condescension of chronocentrism; the designation of performance approach into romantic, mainstream, and period styles; the historical aberration of canonism; and finally, text fetishism, its stiff and inflexible trail buddy.

Chronocentrism, we learn, is "the attitude that one's own time or period is superior; the equivalent in time of the spatial concept of ethnocentrism" (p. 14). In musical terms, this is manifested by applying our modern performance philosophy to the music of all other eras rather than matching the music of a particular era with the performing style that goes with it. This "attitude" is now largely abhorred in progressive society, but still permeates music. We are asked to be sensitive to the contemporary "Other," but not the past "Other."

The heart and soul of The End of Early Music is the notion that there are three very distinctive performance styles: romantic, mainstream, and period. In chapter 2, "Mind the Gap: Current...