On Letting the Music Speak for Itself: Some Reflections on Musicology and Performance

The title of this article1 may suggest that I will give a state-of-the-art report on the relationship between musicology and performance or else outline a program for the future development of that relationship. But neither would be worth my while to prepare nor yours to read. Things are going well. Never, it seems, have scholars and performers worked so closely and happily together or learned more from each other, nor have so many ever before combined the roles as successfully as now. Musicologically trained performers are proliferating in graduate programs around the country. Historical performance practice is now a recognized sub-discipline both of academic musicology and of conservatory curricula. When Mr. Henahan of the New York Times can devote a Sunday column to the merits of historical instruments, or when Mr. Rockwell of the same paper, in a glowing review of Pomerium Musices, can actually list among the group's assets that its director is a musicologist, we may all take some justifiable satisfaction in going at last off the defensive vis-a-vis the press and, us hope, the public. May this trend of recognition continue. We've all worked hard for it, we deserve it, and everything I say here is meant to abet it. But at the same time I should like, as it were among friends, to examine what Charles Rosen has recently called the peculiar metaphysical and ontological assumptions2 that underly much current thinking about musicology and performance, or musicology-cum-performance, or even musicology versus performance. And if much of what follows sounds like an apologia pro vita sua, and therefore immodest, it is because I feel that the only way for me, as a musicologist performer, honestly to approach the question of musicology and performance, is to look within. So me take as my point of departure a little colloquy I had some time ago with a graduate student at Columbia. He claimed that performances of Renaissance sacred music by Cappella Nova, the choral group I direct, were arbitrary and overly personal, and that I would be better advised to let the music speak for itself. Well I can tell you that his remarks rankled in their implication of irresponsibility. I do my homework, after all. I edit the music we perform from its original sources, or at least from pedigreed