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Harpsichords and Related Topics

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Subject:
From:
"J. Claudio Di Veroli" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Harpsichords and Related Topics <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 7 Jan 2016 17:48:44 +0100
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> Michael Brazile wrote: I have to reply with respectful but tremendous
disagreement with your generalargument, Claudio. It's very disappointing to
hear you bristling at a player because they dare to perform in an
"inauthentic" way that isn't justifiable with historical sources.
In my view. the judgment of someone's playing shouldn't be based on how
"historically correct" their playing is, but whether it touches you, ... ,
even if it's in a way that the composer might have never heard it.
This business of "historically correct" or "authentic" performance is an
aesthetic that I wish would completely die out in the early music world. ...
... be fresh! ... be original"

Dear Michael: your counter-reformation is not consistent and, even worse, it
is not even original! It has already been done by centuries of playing the
old French harpsichordists with the piano, with neither inégales nor added
ornaments and with a fully modern aesthetics. 

At the risk of repeating what many widely admired musicians have written,
the revival of early instruments like the harpsichord had as its first and
foremost goal to enable the musician to complement the early music score
with all the implicit things that (though sometimes specified in treatises
but not written on the scores) allow us to play the music the way it was
composed. And this (again books and books written on this) still lives you
LOTS of freedom: no two recordings are alike!

You may play a French Baroque piece égale and omitting ornaments: if so,
however, you are no longer playing the original music, but a modernised
version. You may play it on a piano, electronic instrument, perhaps a modern
orchestra: there is nothing wrong with this, and many people like it, why
not?

It is simply not what the harpsichord has been revived for, and what most of
us harpsichordists try to achieve with the "authentic" interpretation that,
witness recordings by the greatest harpsichordists of our time, is amazingly
varied and expressive, far from being the sterile thing you describe.

Best

CDV







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