Glenn Miller:

>Just so I understand correctly, authentic 18th century can be perform as it
>really sounded in their day but "we" in 20th century cannot hear it because
>of our bias toward 20th century pitch? Is this the general understanding?

Much more to it than that, I think.  The modern audience knows many
things that an original audience could not have done:  if the piece
became well-known and established in the repertoire, or if it more-or-less
disappeared for a hundred years or so.  If the composer became famous after
his death, or if he slipped into obscurity.  If his work had a significant
influence on the development of later music or not.  How music changed over
the following years.  Equally, the original audience knew things that we
have long since forgotten.  The whole cultural and social context.  A great
deal of contemporary music that is now lost.  Perhaps details of the
personal life of the composer.  And so on.

Many of these things may have no effect on how we hear (and "understand")
music that was written a lifetime or more ago, but we cannot know for a
certainty that none of them have any effect at all.  It sems to me more
than likely that an audience that has experienced Wagner's extreme
chromaticism, atonalism, Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, serialism,
aleatoric music, minimalism, the current return to tonality, not to mention
jazz, rock, all sorts of "world" music etc., cannot possibly listen to
music written in the 18th century and experience it as it was experienced
by its original audience.  And that's restricting the point to music - I
could broaden it to include the First World War, the threat of nuclear
extinction, urbanisation and the gradual destruction of our own habitat
on this earth.  And the changes in religion.

Music can most certainly reach across the centuries.  Bach was my first
love in classical music, and may well still be on top of the list when I
get to the end.  But we are fooling ourselves if we believe that music can
also be a time machine, transporting us back to experience it as it once
was.  The times are different, we are different, Bach is dead and cannot
rewrite his music for the benefit of an audience that he could not have
begun to understand.  We do him more honour by finding ways to help his
music survive into the future than by fossilising him with our (quite
possibly incorrect) ideas about how he wanted his music played for people
who are as long dead as he is.

Ian Crisp
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