2008-07-18 14:26:49Chaconne
Passing Thoughts - on authentic movement of classical music
(Friday, May 16, 2008 at 3:45am)
Rachel Podger’s playing is decent, and Andrew Manze’s is, of course, extremely inspirational. However, no matter how much I enjoy (in fact, a lot) all those HIP recordings, what underlines my immense enjoyment is, frustratingly, anxiety.
There were fragments of thought on this; all a sudden, it becomes a thought.
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The anxiety, or even disgust, upon the urge towards ”authentic interpretation” is not musical, but political. After more than a century of globalization, popularization, and, to some extents, democratization of classical music, what so-called authentic movement calls for is largely counter-democratic. By researching, defining, and imposing what ”authentic” is, it attempts to re-constitute a world-scale knowledge institution upon classical music, and re-demarcate between (active) centers and (passive) peripherals in such an institution. After all, the institutional power, again, belongs to a few elites from limited nation-states with that skin colour.
The whole thing seems to be, though unfortunate, normal in the academic world-system. However, as classical music could be believed as a universal treasure of all humankind, the hierarchical world-system is simply far from such an ideal.
---
Authentic movement, of course, is perfectly fine under the consensus of cultural pluralism. What contextually beautiful, is, after all, beautiful.
Rachel Podger’s playing is decent, and Andrew Manze’s is, of course, extremely inspirational. However, no matter how much I enjoy (in fact, a lot) all those HIP recordings, what underlines my immense enjoyment is, frustratingly, anxiety.
There were fragments of thought on this; all a sudden, it becomes a thought.
---
The anxiety, or even disgust, upon the urge towards ”authentic interpretation” is not musical, but political. After more than a century of globalization, popularization, and, to some extents, democratization of classical music, what so-called authentic movement calls for is largely counter-democratic. By researching, defining, and imposing what ”authentic” is, it attempts to re-constitute a world-scale knowledge institution upon classical music, and re-demarcate between (active) centers and (passive) peripherals in such an institution. After all, the institutional power, again, belongs to a few elites from limited nation-states with that skin colour.
The whole thing seems to be, though unfortunate, normal in the academic world-system. However, as classical music could be believed as a universal treasure of all humankind, the hierarchical world-system is simply far from such an ideal.
---
Authentic movement, of course, is perfectly fine under the consensus of cultural pluralism. What contextually beautiful, is, after all, beautiful.