4. Performance

4. Performance.

From its inception, Modernism influenced not only the direction of musical compositions but also performing practices. A new rationalism and critical formalism emerged in the early 20th century that focussed on clarity, objectivity and historical and stylistic criticism with respect to a musical text. The improvisatory, seemingly over-inflected and boldly personal and expressive character of the late 19th-century performances of the reigning classical canon, particularly Beethoven, came under attack before 1914, notably from Heinrich Schenker. An austere, explicitly anti-sentimental Modernist approach to performance evolved at mid-century and came to dominate; examples include the conducting of Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, Hermann Scherchen and Fritz Reiner, the interpretative strategy of the Kolisch Quartet (and later the Juilliard and Guarneri Quartets), the pianism of Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin and Glenn Gould and the refined approach to the violin displayed by Joseph Szigeti and Jascha Heifetz. Modernism helped impel and sustain a new objectivity towards the past and its attendant revisionism that profoundly influenced scholarship and principles of textual criticism and editing. Guido Adler’s critical construct of the methods and goals of musicology made him sympathetic to the innovations of Mahler, Schoenberg and his protégés, many of whom had been students of Adler in music history. The newness of Modernism, for Adler, writing in 1919, was justified as evidence for the patterns of historical development; therefore, as a ‘child of the times’, he found the tendency to ‘suppress living composers with inappropriate comparisons with works from the past’ unreasonable and intolerable. The later 20th-century penchant for historically based performing practices, pre-Classical repertory and period instruments can also be linked to Modernism. At stake in these trends were a reaction against Romanticism and a reassertion of the primacy of an inherent logic of musical materials. Likewise, late Romantic historicism in taste and subjective appropriation in performance were superseded by a revival of interest in pre-Classical eras, particularly medieval and Renaissance music. Scholarly objectivity with respect to history became a Modernist conceit.