Oct 14 2007
Authenticity
Authenticity was the holy grail of the early music movement for many, many years. As musicians and scholars began to dig more deeply into the problem they discovered, both on a practical and on an epistemological level, that the goal though worth chasing, is not attainable. Like truth, authenticity eludes all attempts at strict definition.
Yesterday, while performing at the Boulder Bach Festival I realized that an important aspect of authenticity has been left out of the equation: flies, flies that buzz around your head, alight on your hands as you play and make you imagine that the coattail brushing against your leg is in fact a pesky fly.
Perhaps lice that crawl down from underneath your wig to search for dinner in other locations would be a further bit of authenticity.
Perfume instead of bathing, anyone?
Yes, authenticity always come back as a question from teachers, critics, colleagues, and ultimately from our own inner critic. But what does it mean to be authentically ourselves, when we have so many aspects of our own personalities to draw from? Even as a composer and performer of my own music, I am constantly changing the interpretation depending on my inspiration that day. So I think that music is a living, breathing thing, which has a home in the world you choose for it. And even though I like to follow J.S. Bach’s suggestions for ornamentation and C.P.E. Bach’s rules for executing those ornaments, it needs to make sense to me now, today, in my own world.
Besides that, I wanted to ask you what type of instrument you were playing to make the recording of the partita on the website. It’s quite lovely, and so is your interpretation.