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

Scholarly discussions of performance practice have permeated musicological literature since the 1980s, concentrating in particular on issues of authenticity in historical music-making. In The End of Early Music, Haynes continues in a similar vein, offering provocative opinions about ‘matters of style, performance, [and] the communication of emotion’ in the current Historically Inspired (rather than Informed) Performance movement (hip). One main feature distinguishing this book from previous studies, however, is Haynes’s adoption of the term Rhetorical music to designate all aspects of ‘musicking’ prior to the Romantic Revolution. Feeling that Rhetorical music better ‘expresses the essence of the musical spirit’ in the Baroque era than the more common rubric Early music, Haynes’s consideration of hip through this lens informs much of his study. The End of Early Music is organized into five sections, presenting Haynes’s ideas to the accompaniment of no fewer than seventy-two online musical examples.

Haynes begins by defining current performance styles, which he divides into three main categories: Modern, Romantic, and Period. Not only does he highlight their musical characteristics, but also examines their surrounding ideologies. His aversion to Modern style is succinctly summed up in the title of the third chapter, ‘Mainstream Style “Chops, but No Soul.”’ Haynes likens Modern ensemble performers to automatons: musicians so concerned with the literal interpretation of the score that the only music they are capable of producing is characterized by a lack of beat hierarchy, unyielding tempos, unstressed dissonances, ‘rigidly equal’ sixteenth notes, and emotional detachment. Romantic style is given a better rap, although Haynes does not shy away from stressing its overly exaggerated portamento, legato, tempo, and rubato, as well as the melody-based phrasing, unrelenting heaviness, and general lack of precision. Nevertheless, Haynes does concede that both Modern and Romantic styles are useful for certain repertories – Rhetorical music is not one of them, of course.

One might expect Haynes, a Period performer, to offer a glowing review of the current hip movement or Period style, yet this is not the case. If anything, The End of Early Music is a manifesto of sorts, urging Period performers to cast off notions of Werktreue and text-fetishism inherited from the legacy of Romantic music, and promoting a more fluid performance style than that of ‘Strait’ (as in ‘strait jacket’) modernists. In an attempt to revitalize hip, Haynes devotes the majority of his study to contrasting various aspects of Rhetorical music-making with that of the Romantic and Modern periods. In an admirable chapter ‘Changing Meanings, Permanent Symbols,’ he outlines the disparity between the descriptive notation of Rhetorical music and prescriptive notation of later periods. The role of Period instruments in current performance practice and the importance of Period composition are also considered. Finally, Haynes examines the implications of a rhetorically based approach to musical performance in which melodic figures and gestures dominate, declamation is key to musical execution, listeners become active participants, and performers seek ‘to win over the hearts of their listeners,’ just like a good orator would. Ultimately, Haynes’s concern is not that Period performers reproduce the music of Bach or Vivaldi ‘the way it really was,’ but that they try to achieve an authentic, rhetorically based performance style using all the available tools and evidence, for, in the end, that style will still be ‘our own.’

The ideas proposed in The End of Early Music provide modern Period performers with a historically sound framework upon which to build their interpretations of Rhetorical music. Haynes’s book not only provides ‘personal reflections’ on the hip movement, as stated in the humble preface, but also actively engages with source writings on Baroque musical performance by Matheson, Quantz, North, and Burney, among others. His notions of Period style suggest a musical landscape similar to that of the Baroque era, in which performers were also composers, and a piece of music was different each...