MUMH 5010: Fall 2008

Dr. Alonso-Minutti

MONDAY October 6

READ:
Taruskin, Richard. “On Letting the Music Speak for Itself.” In Text and Act. New York: Oxford
UP, 1995. (Electronic course reserves)

1. How does Taruskin problematize the ideal of “letting the music speak for itself”?
2. How was the attitude of certain composers such as Brahms, Stravinsky, Babbitt, and
Carter towards performers/performances as evidenced by Taruskin’s account?
3. Explain the implications of this standpoint: “once the piece is finished, the composer
regards it and relates to it either as a performer if he is one, or else simply as a listener.”
4. What is the argument behind the “intentional fallacy”?
5. Taruskin writes that: “Music has to be imaginatively re-created in order to be retrieved,
and here is where conflicts are likely to arise between the performer’s imagination and
the scholar’s conscience, even (or especially) when the two are housed in a single mind.”
Where do the possible conflicts lie?
6. What do you think about approaching performance as documentation? What are some
of the advantages and/or disadvantages?
7. What are Taruskin’s parameters of “authenticity”?
8. How do historical reconstructionist performances become autonomous objects?
9. What are the challenges of a scholar vs. the challenges of a performer when dealing with
historical reconstructionism?
10. In his Postscript, Taruskin relates an “attack” by Peter Williams, a British organist. How
does Taruskin address Williams’ points, and what does this debate grants to the issue at
task (historical performance)?

WEDNESDAY October 8

READ:
Butt, John. “Joining the Historical Performance Debate.” In Playing with History: The Historical
Approach to Music Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. (Electronic course reserves)

Skim the article but carefully read the subsection titled “Richard Taruskin and the Public
Expansion of the Early Music Debate,” pp. 14-24.

• Butt provides an overview of the scholarship of historical performances. He qualifies

Taruskin’s approach to the subject as “the most influential and by far the most
thought-provoking.” How does Butt address Taruskin’s main arguments? In what
ways Butt agrees and/or disagrees with Taruskin?

PREPARE:
A delimitation of your research topic: in one hundred words summarize your research
endeavor.