Depths and Dimness, part 2

One of the things I wanted to get to yesterday, but could only hint at, is how much our view of the past is influenced by the fact that it is our view, from our perspective. I was outraged the first time I encountered Richard Taruskin's brilliant discussion of the Early Music Movement and particularly the concept of 'authenticity' that was so important. He pointed out, against considerable protest and resistance, that the values of modernism: crisp execution within strict tempi, for example, were precisely the values that were supposedly the 'authentic' ones of early music performance. Why? Well, because it was musicians from the same generation that were both creating modern music and re-creating Baroque music.

This brings me back to my sardonic remark of yesterday: "why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff?"
 Well, it doesn't, of course, but any musician/scholar of today is going to be unconsciously looking to come up with something that sounds 'ancient' and since there are no models, then the primitivism of Orff will inevitably lurk in the back of one's mind. Ancient music notation is so vague and confusing that it is like a Rorschach inkblot upon which we can project whatever is on our minds. Here is the Orff piece:

At the root of both modernism and the search for ancient music are the same aesthetic values. As Taruskin points out, early music performance is precisely 'authentic' if it does reflect our aesthetic values. How else could it be?

But still, the urge to hear, to understand music that is far from us, like capturing an image of a moon of Saturn in a flyby, never quite leaves us. But we will only be affected by the music if we do somehow share aesthetic values with it. Often, like the music by Carl Orff, we will be merely projecting our aesthetic values on music that may not share them... The book to read is the collection of essays Text and Act by Richard Taruskin.