© 1989 by Daniel Waitzman. All rights reserved.
Author's Note: This is an electronic version, with slight revisions, of an essay I wrote back in 1989 at the suggestion of Rosalyn Tureck, who was somewhat less than enthralled by it, if I remember correctly. It formed the subject of a feature article by Donal Henahan, which appeared in the "Arts and Leisure" section (Section 2) of The New York Times on Sunday, July 22, 1990. I offer it here in the hope that it may serve to stimulate discussion and, above all, thoughtful consideration of aspects of our musical culture—among members of the classical musical community.
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In 1956, at the age of thirteen, I began the study of the recorder. Within two years I had taken up the Baroque flute. By 1959 I had joined the musicians’ union, made my first recording, gained entrance to the High School of Music and Art as a recorderist, and become known as something of a prodigy in the "early music" community. Although not the very first American Baroque flutist, I was certainly one of the first, and without any question, the youngest at that time.
My choice of the recorder and Baroque flute was dictated partly by musical considerations and partly by practical ones. I had always loved music and had always, from my earliest years, felt a clear sense of how it ought to be played and sung. The music of Wagner and later composers had always seemed grotesque to me. Before finishing grammar school, I had turned away from Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms in favor of Mozart, Haydn, and above all, Bach. I remember getting up before dawn to catch the few available radio broadcasts of medieval and Renaissance music. The attraction of the older repertoire proved irresistible. It seemed to me so much more direct, more honest, more emotionally moving, more sensuous, more musically pure, and more purely musical than anything else. (And so it still does.) At the same time its apparent freedom from what I considered maudlin emotional excess appealed to an anti-Romantic streak which I, as a boy growing up in mid-twentieth-century America, had absorbed with the air that I breathed. I remember being ashamed of my growing alienation from the music of Beethoven—Beethoven, the champion of the brotherhood of Man, the opening bars of whose Fifth Symphony had served as the Leitmotiv of the Allied cause in the Second World War—but I could not help myself.
What I really wanted to do was to study the harpsichord, which seemed to me the most beautiful and noble of all musical instruments. How superior did the harpsichord’s clear, pungent tone seem to the modern piano’s genteel, common muddiness of timbre! The harpsichord seemed to speak directly to the soul; while the piano carried with it an aura of banality, prettiness, false sentiment, and superficial cheerfulness. Even its foreshortened name bespoke commonality and decadence. Moreover, the piano was the instrument used in grammar school assemblies, and thus carried with it a long string of unpleasant associations to a fire-eater such as myself, who was just embarking upon the exploration of a whole new world of aesthetic truth and beauty, an alternative to the Howdy-Doody world of the nineteen-fifties. [Click here to return to point of cross-reference.] Unfortunately the study of the harpsichord was just not practical for a middle-class youngster in Eisenhower’s America. Accordingly, I settled for the equally-ancient recorder, which had the advantage of being cheap and, so I thought, easy to learn.
My progress on the recorder was considered phenomenal at the time. In a few weeks I played better than the neighborhood teacher and almost as well as the neighborhood teacher’s teacher. The latter referred me to the person then considered the leading recorderist in the United States, with whom I studied for a year before he told me that he had nothing more to teach me.
When my teachers saw that I showed musical ability, they urged me to study the modern flute, saying that the recorder was far too limited an instrument for me. I, however, rejected their advice. I had no desire to play a modern instrument, since I had no desire to play music written after the time of Mozart. I was drawn to what I regarded as the purer, uncorrupted ambience of the "early music" movement. Its exponents seemed more interested in the cultivation of music for its own sake and more concerned with the underlying spiritual values inherent in their chosen repertoire. What they lacked in virtuosity they seemed to make up for in musicality. How exciting it was for a teenager in the late ‘Fifties to emerge from a world of Beecham-Handel arrangements and junior high school band rehearsals to one in which a few dedicated and erudite men and women quietly discussed hemiolas, cross-relations, tempo rubato, and questions of bar line placement and rhythmic stress. What a contrast to the "mainstream" of music-making, which seemed beset by empty virtuosity, mindless imitation, vulgar display, and meretricious prettiness.
The attitude of those involved in early music was rather different than it has since become. Although most early music exponents proclaimed as their goal the achievement of historical authenticity in performance, much as they do today, the rigidity and intolerance that characterize an established order had not yet taken hold. We were anti-Establishment and tolerant of a wide variety of views on how best to attain our common goals. We looked upon ourselves as revolutionaries and reformers, whose goal was the revivification of a wonderful, all-but-forgotten musical culture. We seemed more prepared to compromise on pragmatic matters of instrument design and technique; we seemed more ready to rely on our intuitive sensibilities to fill in the numerous gaps in our historical knowledge. We had no compunctions about using vibrato on the recorder. Vibrato sounded beautiful to our ears, just as the music of the old masters sounded beautiful. And above all, we seemed less ready to condemn our colleagues over matters of style and approach, more sensitive to aural and aesthetic considerations than to historical ones, and less bound by pedantic, ideological strictures. We had, after all, taken up old instruments for very real musical reasons. Our main concern was sound, not pedantic historicism.
Recorder players had no compunctions about using tone projectors, thumb rests, or even special keys on occasion. Harpsichordists used pedals to work the stops of their instrument. And some viol players used end pins and even dispensed with frets. All of these departures from strict historical fidelity were done for purely musical reasons. Some of them admittedly demonstrated a misunderstanding of the basic natures of the instruments and playing techniques in question, which could in fact have been prevented by a more careful consideration of the reasons behind historical precedent. The removal of frets from the viola da gamba, for example, alters the fundamental acoustical nature of that instrument and vitiates the very rationale for its existence. I am not defending those violations of authenticity based on ignorance rather than on reasoned musical judgement, but merely drawing attention to the fact that they indicated a musical openness and flexibility that was both well-intentioned and far closer to the true spiritual reality of the older musical cultures than the strict puritanical orthodoxy that, all-too-soon, displaced it.
In those days the "early music" community consisted essentially of the recorder movement with a few viol players and harpsichordists. We who played the recorder knew that our technique was not very good, that our instruments were still worse, and that we were probably quite far from our goal of historical authenticity. We also realized that our chances of achieving recognition from the musical community at large were slim. None of these things mattered. We cared about musical truth, not public approbation. We were inner-directed. For some of us, myself very much included at the time, the very imperfections of our instruments and our techniques represented virtues, not defects. They proclaimed our aversion to the over-nice, over-refined, over-comfortable decadence of bourgeois, mainstream music-making, so perfectly epitomized by the super-mellow performances heard over the radio on WQXR’s "Piano Personalities." We sacrificed neatness of execution for spiritual integrity. We de-emphasized technique for its own sake because our medium was decidedly not our message. In a sense, we foreshadowed in music the cultural upheaval of the nineteen-sixties; we were musical hippies. But in our dedication to art for art’s sake and in our disciplined absorption in the musical cultures of the past, we were something more as well.
The instruments of early music proclaimed the values we espoused not only to the ear, but also to the eye and to the hand. They were made of organic, once-living materials—trees and elephants’ tusks—not of machined, non-living metal. Their substances were grown, not mined. Their construction was as aesthetically-pleasing as it was redolent of the old-world cultures which created them; their elaborate turnings, sensuous curves, and ivory rings spoke as much to the eye as their music did to the ear. Their form and function were immediately apparent: tone holes lay unobscured by bright, glittery keys. In contrast to modern woodwinds, which are either made of jet-black grenadilla wood or of metal (in the case of the flute), the old woodwinds were made mostly of lighter-colored materials. The modern oboe and clarinet had, to my adolescent’s eyes, the somber, utilitarian appearance of a monk or a nun in ascetic, black robes; their period-instrument counterparts presented a far more exotic, sensuous, and attractive appearance. They smelled of the forest rather than of the factory. And as for the flute—to me, as a fourteen-year-old, the modern Boehm metal flute typified everything that had gone wrong with musical culture since the eighteenth century: it was a machine not a musical instrument, a piece of plumbing (specifically a manifold) as evocative of the Industrial Revolution as a steam locomotive, yet without the steam locomotive’s majesty, a machine built of materials that had never been alive, a machine without a soul. Its key mechanism seemed designed to restrict the player’s human freedom of action through its elaborate articulations and linkages, to replace the performer’s individual artistry with the engineer’s regimented precision. It achieved perfection at the expense of humanity. Its very name was a lie; it was a woodwind only by the grace of that same outmoded semantic convention that decreed that the Queen Mary sailed.
As a teenager I accepted all the premises of the early music community. Accepted is too weak a term. I zealously proclaimed them. As a student at the High School of Music and Art I defended them against all attacks, including those of some of my classmates who were later to become self-proclaimed early music gurus. For me the principles of the authentic performance movement were not pragmatic guidelines, as they were for my elders, but articles of faith. I longed for the day when the music of Bach and his contemporaries and predecessors would be performed exclusively on original instruments or exact replicas, using historically-authentic techniques and musical usages. I damned modern harpsichordists for using modern fingerings and pedal-operated registration stops. I criticized those who believed that the recorder should be modernized. When I took violin lessons, I replaced my metal-wound strings with gut. I accepted the view now in fashion that the musical culture of the old masters constituted a Gestalt (although I would not, at the age of fourteen, have phrased it in this way), intimately linked with the extra-musical culture of its time, an integral whole to be accepted as an inviolable entity. To me, every miserable cross-fingering, every out-of-tune note of a Baroque flute or recorder was something to be passionately defended as integral to the totality of our musical heritage. To correct an authentically-false note was to distort and bowdlerize a wonderful underlying aesthetic totality that was quite beyond the full comprehension of our decadent twentieth-century ears, but which we must preserve and attempt to approach as faithfully as possible. If it was good enough for Bach (and I did not for a moment think to question whether or not it was in fact good enough for Bach), it must be good enough for us. If our ears and sensibilities said otherwise, our ears and sensibilities must be at fault. We could not possibly know what hidden aesthetic message lay behind the apparent imperfections of historical instruments. To attempt to "improve" was heresy; it led inevitably to the world of Beecham-Handel, Stokowski-Bach, and WQXR-"Piano Personalities."
And so I ignored the advice of my teachers. I did not study the modern flute. Instead, driven by a desire to experience the music of Bach and Telemann on the flute that these composers knew, I began the study of the Baroque flute.
My proficiency on the recorder did not quite prepare me for my struggle with the Baroque flute. The recorder, though lacking in elaborate keywork, achieves a very high degree of technical perfection through purely non-mechanical, acoustical means. From the player’s point of view, it lies far closer to the modern flute than to the Baroque flute, despite its close structural resemblance to the latter. The recorder is, in fact, the most technically perfect of all the old woodwinds. The Baroque flute is the least technically perfect, a fact recognized by the old masters themselves, including the great flutist Quantz. This disparity between the two instruments stems from fundamental and immutable acoustical laws. The recorder is a wide-bored flute with an end-blown whistle mouthpiece, on which the upper notes are obtained almost exclusively through recourse to a comprehensive system of speaker-vents, identical in principle to the speaker keys on the modern oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone. The flute is a narrow-bored instrument with a side-blown embouchure hole on which the upper notes are obtained through variations in the configuration of the mouthpiece itself, with the assistance of a far less comprehensive system of speaker-vents than we find on the recorder. The mouthpiece, more properly called the embouchure, is formed by the player’s lips. The flute must retain its narrow bore in order that the player may obtain the upper notes through changes in embouchure alone.
On both recorder and Baroque flute, those notes outside of the basic diatonic tonality of each instrument must be produced by means of cross-fingering, the covering of one or more holes below an open hole. The essential difference between recorder and flute lies in the quality of these cross-fingered notes. On the recorder such notes are nearly as perfect in intonation and in homogeneity of timbre as on the modern flute, (on which each semitone has its own separate tone-hole). The excellence of the recorder’s cross-fingerings probably results from the wide bore in combination with the whistle mouthpiece. Furthermore, the recorder provides the player with a very large vocabulary of duplicate fingerings, each with its own timbre, dynamic level, and optimum linkage to other notes in legato passagework; this rich vocabulary of fingerings makes up in large part for recorder’s fixed windway. On the Baroque flute, the cross-fingered notes are notoriously imperfect in intonation and timbre, on account of the obligatory narrow bore and side-blown embouchure hole; they become acceptable only when corrected by the player’s embouchure. Such corrections can be undertaken only to a limited extent in fast passagework; and some notes can be corrected only to a limited degree and at the expense of timbre and volume. In addition, the Baroque flute offers the player a very small vocabulary of fingerings by comparison to the recorder. Thus the timbre of the Baroque flute varies widely from one tonality to the next. D Major is the most brilliant key. E Major is one of the worst keys, but very effective if the composer brings to bear an intimate knowledge of the flute’s capabilities. B-flat major possesses a beautiful veiled quality, but is generally unsuitable for brilliant passagework. C Minor—the key of Bach’s Musical Offering—is hideously out of tune, unless used with care. And so on.
This heterogeneity of timbre and dynamic level represents one of the Baroque flute’s very real virtues as well as one of its very serious defects. It all depends upon the particular piece in question. In those cases where the composer succeeds in matching the instrument’s key, and hence, its tonal profile, to the musical and emotional profile of the music, the Baroque flute can function admirably—in some cases, better than the Boehm flute, either in its cylindrical or conical form. The Boehm flute lacks virtually all of the Baroque flute’s cross-fingerings; it was sharply criticized on this account when it first appeared; and even though it is possible to duplicate the distinctive timbre and volume of these cross-fingerings through changes in embouchure, the effect is not always the same. If the Baroque flute tends towards tonal anarchy, then the Boehm flute tends towards tonal monotony. Neither instrument is perfect. Each must be corrected by the player in approximately opposite directions. But on the whole, the musical advantage lies with the Boehm flute. The Baroque flute tends to enforce a relatively rigid pattern of dynamic and timbric inflection upon the music. It might be likened to the early imitation color television, which simply had a glass, tinted blue at the top, Caucasian pink in the center, and brown at the bottom, positioned in front of an ordinary black-and-white tube. This device, while adequate for a commonly encountered portion of its "repertoire," Western movies, proved likewise too rigid in its range of expressive patterns. The Boehm flute at least offers the player a far greater freedom of choice than its Baroque predecessor. As a small example, consider the effect of an A appoggiatura resolving to a G# in either of the first two octaves. On the Baroque flute, such a passage is almost impossible to execute unmusically, since plain-fingered A is a relatively strong note while cross-fingered G# is the weakest note on the instrument. The same effect can be produced on the modern flute or conical Boehm flute, but only if the player understands the musical necessity for playing the resolution of an appoggiatura considerably softer than the appoggiatura itself. On the other hand, consider the opposite situation: a G# appoggiatura resolving upward to A. Here the musical advantage lies completely with the later flutes; the Baroque flute cannot be forced to play the A more softly than the G#, except by reducing the volume of both notes to an unconscionable degree.[Click here to return to point of cross-reference.] Unfortunately, the old composers tended to ignore the idiosyncrasies of the Baroque flute with sufficient frequency as to cast serious doubts upon the Baroque flute’s musical suitability for its own repertoire. They did so in some cases out of ignorance—not every composer played the flute—and in others out of a musical idealism that led them to give greater consideration to the pure musical idea than to the possibilities of its practical realization in performance.
At the time I began to study the Baroque one-keyed flute, there was no one in this country who had specialized in this instrument. I was obliged to take some modern flute lessons simply to learn how to form a transverse flute embouchure. Fascinated though I was by the modern flute’s brilliant design, I displayed a marked aversion to that instrument, which did not endear me to my modern flute teacher. Having gained a knowledge of flute embouchure, I proceeded, mostly on my own, to figure out how to play the Baroque flute. I translated and studied Hotteterre-le Romain’s Principes de la Flûte, and visited the Music Division of the New York Public Library, then still at Forty-second Street, to read Nicholson’s early nineteenth-century instruction book and a number of other eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century tutors in order to assimilate the basic principles of one-keyed flute technique. Years later I read Quantz’s great work. One thing that impressed me, although I did not grasp its full implications until later, was the evident humanity of the writers of these treatises. Hotteterre admonishes the student always to do what is most natural. Quantz advises the player to touch his chin with powder from his wig to absorb the perspiration and keep the flute from slipping. Clearly the old masters were as human as we are; they even sweated. And they were rational and reasonable. One could identify with them as fellow human beings despite the passage of centuries. Their thoughts and emotions could legitimately be ours. They were part of our legacy and of our common humanity. What a revelation this was to me!
In 1962 I made my first recording on the Baroque flute as a sophomore in Columbia College majoring in Music. Shortly thereafter I became proficient enough to perform Bach’s B Minor Sonata for Flute and Harpsichord on the Baroque flute, along with some of the sonatas and chamber works of J.C.F. Bach, Quantz, and Telemann.
By then, I had begun to experience my first doubts about the wisdom of early music orthodoxy. I kept coming across passages in the old repertoire which highlighted the Baroque flute’s worst features—passages that could not be played effectively or in tune, essential trills that could not be played at all, appoggiaturas that could not be executed with any degree of musical authenticity, due to their resolving to a strong plain-fingered note from a weak cross-fingered one. (I have already cited one example of the latter: see above, [click here].) Despite its beautiful sound and superb articulation capabilities, the Baroque flute seemed frequently to get in the way of a just realization of its musical repertoire. The old masters were so exacting in their musical standards, so god-like in the magnitude of their musical achievements. Could they have approved of the gross defects of the Baroque flute? Most of the other old instruments seemed so well-suited to their repertoire: the harpsichord, the organ, the German fortepiano, and the violin and viol families, for example. How could some of their instruments be so fine and others so crude? Could the apparent defects of the Baroque flute have been the result of deliberate aesthetic decisions; were modern ears simply uneducated and unaccustomed to the expressive subtleties which they represented? Some early music apologists seemed to think that this must have been the case: there appeared articles propounding the view that eighteenth-century flute music used microtonal elements, and that the Baroque flute’s out-of-tune trills and defective notes must be perceived as expressive devices integral with the aesthetic sensibility of its repertoire.[Footnote 1]I could not accept this view, however much I tried; it struck me as a classic and particularly egregious example of fallacious reasoning based on affirmation of the consequent.[Footnote 2]If it were true, why was only the flute so blessed, and, to a lesser extent, the other woodwinds? Why were singers and violinists not taught to sound their F’s high in pitch and relatively weak in volume, and their bb’-a’ trill always with an auxiliary note a quarter-tone sharp after the performance of an in-tune appoggiatura? Why were these notes not tuned and voiced this way on the harpsichord and organ? It would have been easy enough to do so. I found it impossible to believe that J.C.F. Bach and C.P.E. Bach could have approved of the fact that the e’’’-d’’’ trill, which figures prominently in their flute music, could not be played properly. I found it likewise impossible to believe that J.S. Bach could have approved of the sound of much of his flute music on the flute of his time. And such things were not a question of some lost art of flute-playing or of flute construction. By that time, even though far from satisfied with my level of accomplishment on the old flute, I had learned enough to know what was possible on the one-keyed flute and what was not. The facts were inescapable: the old masters demanded certain capabilities from the flute which the instruments of their time simply lacked. In a world in which no better flute was available, flutists would do the best they could and the spiritually-oriented listeners of the ancien régime would fill in the gaps mentally, as C.P.E. Bach said in his book: and so musical life would go on.[Footnote 3] But was this dysfunction an integral and essential part of the old musical cultures; or was it rather an obstreperous artifact imposed by a kind of cultural lag, a disparity between the levels of technological achievement in woodwind instrument design and spiritual achievement in musical composition? And if it were the latter, what rights, if any, did I have, as a twentieth-century flutist dedicated to the cultivation and revivification of the art of the old masters, to alter the historical status quo? In my musicological studies I began to come across trenchant criticisms by the old masters themselves of the wind instruments at their disposal, most notably the old flute. Furthermore, the old repertoire to which I had chosen to dedicate my musical existence made extensive demands upon the performer’s individual initiative and imagination, in terms of dynamic nuance, tempo rubato, articulation, free embellishment, improvised cadenzas, and even orchestration. It not only encouraged but demanded an approach characterized by freedom of thought and of action, unhampered by ideological strictures; it placed a premium upon individual initiative. As I became more familiar with the old theorists and with their music, one salient fact emerged. The old masters were first and foremost musical libertarians and spiritual idealists, rather than modern materialists. The modern notion of materialistic historical authenticity had no meaning to them; the concept was totally foreign to their mentality. They paid allegiance only to an idealized Platonic concept of a musical perfection which existed in the realm of the spirit, that is to say, in the mind’s ear. In pursuit of this spiritual idealism, they spared no effort to improve upon the status quo; they were never satisfied with the way things were. Examples that come to mind include J.S. Bach’s active interest in Silbermann’s efforts to improve the new fortepiano, C.P.E. Bach’s advocacy of new keyboard instruments, including the fortepiano and bowed clavier, Quantz’s addition of the second key to the flute for distinguishing between D# and Eb in mean-tone temperament and his enlargement of the bore and embouchure hole to produce a fuller sound, and J.S. Bach’s continuing struggle to deepen his mastery of his art until literally a few hours before his death. The musical lives of the best of the old masters epitomized the very purpose of Art, which is the pursuit of what ought to be, not what was or is. It may be, as some believe, that "progress" never occurs in art.[Footnote 4] But it does decidedly occur in technology; and musical instruments, as well as performance techniques, are as much aspects of technology as of art. Musical instruments are both the most and the least important elements of music-making. They are the most important because they provide the physical means to transmit to the listener the sound waves which constitute the physical reality of music in performance—which in turn represents the immediate goal of musical art. They are the least important because musical instruments are but tools, like a paintbrush or a chisel, for the achievement of an artistic end—and because any musical performance, however exalted, represents merely a snapshot of a number of ongoing and much deeper musical realities: the musical development of each of the performers, a particular view of an infinitely-dimensioned musical work, an ongoing dialogue across the centuries between the thoughts and sensibilities of composer and performer, and the musical development of the work in question as expressed in performance. To be sure, the good and bad characteristics of musical instruments color the composer’s and performer’s always unrealizable Platonic ideal of musical perfection and hence participate in the act of musical creation as something more than mere technological tools; but the concept of Platonic idealism holds true even for musical instruments themselves. The ideal Baroque flute, as it exists in the mind of God and as it existed in the imagination of J.S. Bach, must both partake of the realities of the so-called "Baroque" flute and transcend these realities, in accordance with the principles of musical idealism and the spiritual orientation of musical culture under the ancien régime. A truly authentic Baroque flute does not exist; it cannot exist except in the imagination; but it was, and remains, the duty of flute-makers and flutists to try to approach the temporal realization of its Platonic ideal through improvements in instrument design and instrumental techniques—which together constitute what might be called the technological aspects of musical performance. Such had been the attitude of the old masters themselves, as is obvious from everything they said and did.
I concluded that regardless of whether or not we twentieth-century musicians could ever equal the supremely great achievements of our musical forebears, our musical duty nevertheless demanded that we try to make their attitudes our own, to act as they did, in respect to musical idealism, openness to improvement in instrumental design and instrumental technique, and above all, in regard to liberty of musical conscience. We must never accept the status quo on faith, historical or otherwise. In order to remain true to the spiritual and aesthetic reality of the old musical cultures, we must be prepared to depart from the letter of these cultures on occasion; we must strive to improve upon the achievements of the old masters, not merely to duplicate them. The concrete technology of musical performance must remain subservient to the abstract spiritual idealism of musical perfection, as must the very art of musical performance itself. To aim for mere replication of musical performance technology as a final goal, as most modern early music performers do, rather than as a way station on the road to the always unattainable goal of true musical authenticity—to confuse the letter of our musical legacy with its substance—is to violate the most sacred tenets of the old masters whose musical culture we purport to revivify. In short, our allegiance must be to the spiritual perfection of musical authenticity, not to archaeological authenticity or to musical conservation and restoration. It seemed to me that we must, paradoxically, act in this fashion even if we espoused strict historical authenticity as a valid goal. To do otherwise would contravene the musically- and historically-authentic spiritual and philosophical orientation of the old masters themselves and thereby perpetrate the most serious and fundamental violation of the very doctrine of historical authenticity. It would mean substituting a pale simulacrum for the true essence of the older musical cultures.
I reasoned further that the old masters enjoyed liberty of conscience by virtue of their spiritual birthright to the music of their culture. Everything they did was by definition "authentic." This birthright, however, derived not from mere chronological concurrence, as many other early music persons believed: an eighteenth-century coachman could no more claim authority in respect to the musical performance practices of his time than can a modern bus driver in respect to the musical performance practices of Speculum Musicae. Such authority derives from assimilated knowledge and sensibility alone, which knowledge and sensibility the old masters possessed to a god-like degree. Now the early music movement had as one of its more legitimate goals the acquisition and assimilation of knowledge of older musical cultures. Its practitioners began with the premise that they knew nothing, or worse, that their ears and sensibilities were filled with anachronistic absurdities and misconceptions in regard to the music of the more distant past. Hence they assumed that their ability to judge was worthless without the support of the quasi-scientific, concrete "evidence" of historical, musicological research at every stage of the formulation of a present-day musical interpretation of an older work. This is the most cogent rationale behind strict adherence to historical performance practice, a more accurate term for which is historical fundamentalism. Historical fundamentalists interpret musicological source material literally, as do religious fundamentalists. Unlike religious fundamentalism, however, historical fundamentalism derives from the misapplication of modern materialism and quasi-scientific principles, combined with liberal doses of post-World War I nihilism and anti-Romanticism, to the study and performance of the older musical repertoire, coupled with a heavy infusion of scholastic pedanticism which dates back at least to the Middle Ages. The combination is as odd as it is redolent of the modern Zeitgeist. Historical fundamentalism attempts to treat musicological "evidence" as if it were empirical scientific evidence and music a scientific discipline. In so doing, it misconstrues, misinterprets, and rigidifies the essential spiritual qualities of the old masters, as expressed in their musical and theoretical writings alike, in much the same way as the Medieval physicians misconstrued, misinterpreted, and rigidified those of the ancient physician Galen.[Footnote 5]In both cases, the inheritors of a great and intellectually free tradition vitiated the essence of what they attempted to preserve by their very attempts at preservation; they defeated their own ostensible cause by an over-emphasis on external aspects of their subjects at the expense of underlying principles. We may, in passing, reflect that the history of so many human disciplines is the history of the vitiation of the work of great minds by their mediocre successors, to the point where a new generation of great minds perceives the necessity for radical reforms and implements these reforms, and the whole sad process then begins anew.
Given the state of musical sensibility at the time of the rise of the early music movement, the historical fundamentalist rationale was quite a musically-defensible one. As the early music movement has matured, however, more and more has been discovered and assimilated, to the point where some of us may legitimately constitute ourselves as, say, neo-eighteenth-century musicians, with all the rights and privileges that go with such status. When I read Quantz and C.P.E. Bach, I feel that I am reading works written by colleagues, older and wiser colleagues, to be sure, but colleagues nonetheless: I understand what they are saying and why they say it; their books speak to me as practical descriptions of what I already know and feel, just as their music speaks to me. On occasion I may disagree with some of their precepts; but I do so on the same basis as I might disagree with some of the views of my corporeally-living colleagues, with whom I rehearse and perform. Now if our understanding has grown to the point where our aesthetic and musical consensus lies so close to that of the old masters as to differ from it no more than one colleague differs from another, the rationale for historical fundamentalism disappears. We too possess the birthright to liberty of conscience in the performance of the older repertoire. We can be good, bad, or somewhere in between, but never "inauthentic." This being the case, it behooves us to regard and to evaluate all musical instruments, old and new, and all performance possibilities as well, as if they, along with we ourselves, were all contemporaneous with the old masters. So I reasoned towards the end of my college years. Later my studies in pursuit of a Masters degree in Musicology at Columbia University under Paul Henry Lang reinforced my views regarding these matters. I recognized, to be sure, that the road which I had chosen lay perilously close to the pitfalls of Beecham-Handel arrangements and other aesthetic horrors; but no worthwhile artistic endeavor can be accomplished by avoidance of failure alone. One must be willing to take chances and to fail miserably on occasion. Sir Thomas Beecham erred not in principle but through lapses of good taste, that is to say, sensibility. Sensibility is nothing less than an idealistic, supra-verbal, intuitive formulation of pure musical logic, filtered through, and enriched by, the emotions and intellect of the performer. And the anti-Romanticism that even today infuses much early music activity is a spurious phenomenon. Romanticism, born of the composer’s and performer’s emotional involvement and openness, and of their complete freedom of thought and action, is an essential attribute of all music and of all musical performance. It reflects the distillation and transformation of raw human sensuality into an abstract and rarefied art that bypasses verbal communication to address the human psyche directly; it constitutes an integral part of what music is all about. The old masters were Romantics, as were virtually all musicians until the twentieth century. Intuitive, supra-rational sensibility is the proper methodology of Art; and music, which is totally without the corporeal existence of painting or sculpture, is the quintessentially purest of the arts.[footnote 6] It is in essence a pure Platonic construct. Art is the creation and study of an internal subjective universe by means of a subjective, essentially intuitive methodology. Art is akin to religion, except that religion concerns itself with the outer universe. Religion applies the methodology of Art to the study of cosmology, cosmogony, and natural philosophy, which are best studied through the objective methodology of Science. The subjective methodology of Religion is unsuited to the study of the external universe because the reality of this external universe is objective rather than subjective, real rather than imaginary, non-human rather than anthropomorphic. The anthropomorphic God of Religion, and the homocentric universe over which He rules, represent artistic creations of Man. They are false because the universe is not a man-made work of art. God, as a valid and useful concept, lives only in Art, and perhaps in Ethics, which is itself an art. The objective methodology of Science is unsuited to the study of Art because the reality of Art is subjective rather than objective, imaginary rather than real, anthropomorphic rather than non-human.[footnote 7] The difficulties that have beset Western music increasingly since 1800 and even before stem from our failure to reconcile the spiritual inner world of musical art with the materialistic outer world of objective reality and to separate the two—in short, to fulfill the artistic functions performed almost naturally by the otherwise reprehensible and oppressive ancien régime.[footnote 8] It is significant that music flourished in the West during the centuries before militant Christianity gave way to Science and materialism, with the coming of the Enlightenment and its sequelae, as the dominant world view.[footnote 9] And the true nature of Science, like that of Art, has been widely misunderstood by many non-scientists in the modern world. On the highest level, Science is both more intuitive and more limited in scope than most people believe.[footnote 10] True science knows where it does not belong; it shies away from situations involving countless uncontrolled and rationally-uncontrollable variables—such as the practice of Music as an Art. Where good science stops, pseudo-science steps in, thanks to the exaggerated, almost religious awe with which the popular mind views scientific methodology. Pseudo-science uses the trappings of science, but without the scientific intuition necessary to evaluate data and to judge whether or not a given subject ought to be investigated scientifically in the first place. How ridiculous and futile to try to make musical performance the object of quasi-scientific conservation-and-restoration! Similarly, when the subjective, intuitive Romanticism of music is misunderstood and misapplied to the outer world of temporal, everyday reality, the results are disastrous. Such pathological artistic episodes as dodecaphony represent a misapplication of pseudo-scientific principles to the imaginary inner world of Music. Such pathological political episodes as Nazism represent a misapplication of pseudo-artistic principles to the all-too-real external world of politics.[footnote 11] Both were equally disastrous in their respective spheres. And the early music movement represents both a logical reformist impulse engendered by the corruption of Western musical thought and, in its historical fundamentalist dimension, an anachronistic projection of modern materialism upon older musical cultures, a mistaken attempt to apply a quasi-scientific, materialistic objectivity to the music of the past.
Motivated by such considerations, I abandoned my former historical fundamentalist orthodoxy, at least in theory, though not yet in practice. My aversion to the modern flute remained: its sound still seemed to me unsuited to the music that I wanted to play. Neither did I wish to study the eight-keyed flute, which appeared to me as an interim Rube Goldberg attempt to improve the Baroque flute through the addition of an uncoordinated, philosophically-illogical, awkward-to-use assortment of extra keys. And although I had heard and played on a conical Boehm flute as early as 1958, I was not impressed with it. Despite its retention of the conical bore and wooden tube of the Baroque flute, it had sounded too much like a modern flute to my ears, a circumstance which I attributed to the enlargement of the tone holes. I concluded that my best course of action was to have a Baroque flute built with the left-hand mechanism of the conical Boehm and a right-hand mechanism similar to that of the modern oboe (itself a combination of eight-keyed flute mechanism with Boehm-system keywork), while keeping the holes smaller than those that I had seen on the average conical Boehm. This arrangement, I thought, would correct the Baroque flute’s worst defects while retaining its positive qualities as far as possible. In 1963 I submitted a plan for such an instrument to the leading American Baroque flute and recorder maker. The plan proved economically and practically unfeasible at the time, and nothing came of it.
Frustrated by the defects of the Baroque flute and by my inability to acquire a—for me—viable alternative, I turned more to the recorder. For the first time my level of technical proficiency on the recorder began to surpass that of the best eighteenth-century schools of recorder-playing. This was not as much of an achievement as it sounds, for the level of recorder-playing in the old days was really quite primitive. The recorder was always considered a doubler’s instrument rather than a solo instrument in its own right, except for about 40 years, mostly in parts of Germany and in Vivaldi’s Venice. The eighteenth century did not appreciate the true nature of the recorder, nor did it come close to exploiting its potential. [Click here to return to point of cross-reference.] I felt increasingly frustrated by the scant original repertoire of both musical and technical interest for recorder. In the course of my composition studies with Otto Luening I wrote solo and trio sonatas for recorder. Although these were terrible works musically, they made increasingly sophisticated demands on the instrument, particularly in the high register, which is the best and most tonally expressive register of the recorder for solo work. It became a kind of game for me to see how far I could push the recorder; I became a kind of recorder-playing Chuck Yeager. Here again I came up against the stone wall of doctrinaire historical authenticity. Since the role of the recorder was relatively circumscribed in the eighteenth century, the only way I could carve out a meaningful and challenging musical niche for myself as a recorderist was by departing from the path of modern early music orthodoxy, with its emphasis on rigid adherence to historical precedent.
The most important technique for expanding the recorder’s compass and expressive powers involves the opening and closing of the bell or end hole as if it were just another tone hole. This procedure augments the recorder’s already rich vocabulary of duplicate fingerings and thereby extends its usable melodic range to two-and-one-half octaves, increases its powers of legato, and widens its dynamic and tonal range. Such techniques were known to the old masters as early as the sixteenth century, though they were never properly codified. It was only in the twentieth century that a special bell key to facilitate control of this end hole had been fitted to the recorder; previously the bell had been closed by the player’s knee. In 1965 I had a bell key put on my recorder. I was not by any means the first to do so—my teacher had experimented with this device and Carl Dolmetsch had done so before him—but I was the first to realize that it represented a fundamental expansion of the instrument’s potential equal in magnitude to that which resulted from the addition of the D# key to the transverse flute in the mid-seventeenth century. It was the addition of this key, together with changes in bore configuration, which created the Baroque one-keyed flute and marked the beginning of the emergence of the transverse flute as a modern solo and orchestral woodwind.
By 1966, I had begun to codify a technique proper to the bell-keyed recorder. Frustrated by the scarcity of musically and technically challenging solo literature for the recorder, I arranged and performed a number of J.S. Bach’s works for bell-keyed recorder, starting with the E Major Violin Concerto and continuing with three of the Organ Trio Sonatas. I soon realized that a bell-keyed recorder must be tuned and voiced differently than a keyless recorder in order to realize all the advantages provided by the key. The modifications are slight but crucial and difficult to achieve; they involve subtle changes in bore configuration, tone-hole placement, and voicing. I described them and listed all the fingerings appropriate for such an instrument in an article published in 1968.[footnote 12]
Having come so far on the recorder, I was naïve enough to expect that within a few years other players as well as recorder makers would follow suit, and that the future of the recorder as a serious woodwind would be secure and my own musical future as a recorderist along with it. I hoped for an end to the growing alienation I had already begun to feel from the early music community and the recorder-playing community in particular. Indeed I dreamed eventually of the development of a modernized recorder, which would realize fully the potentialities of the whistle flute.
But it was not to be. My article met with derision and apathy. No recorder maker took up my suggestion that the bell key become a standard addition to the recorder. No recorder maker attempted to duplicate the modifications necessary to enable the player to make optimum use of bell-key. (Ten years later the publication of my book on bell-keyed recorder technique resulted in glowing reviews in the United States and Germany and scathing reviews in England, but few practical consequences.[footnote 13]) To this day, the negative reactions of the recorder-playing and early music opinion-leaders to my achievements on the recorder defy my attempts at rational explanation. I had described in detail substantial improvements in recorder technique and design that did not in any way compromise the instrument’s authentic sound. I had not only committed my insights freely to print but was actively engaged in performances that demonstrated the accuracy of my assertions and technical descriptions. Audiences at large greeted these performances with standing ovations. The recorder community, in contrast, received them with a kind of dumb astonishment: they were obviously impressed but could not seem to relate to my work. One correspondent eagerly anticipated the day when someone would write a recorder piece that did not require the performer to play a single note. He suggested that bell keys were as irrelevant as "door keys." The silly season was upon us; the rampant Dadaism of contemporary "music" had contaminated early music culture. In retrospect I cannot help thinking that it had never been far off to begin with. I, as an eager music-loving adolescent, had merely chosen to ignore its presence. I felt increasingly alienated from the musical world in which I had grown up. I could not follow a lock-step approach to music-making, conform to a party line, or aspire to anything less than the best of which I was capable. Neither could I refrain from thinking.
I realized that the American early music world was changing. European recorderists began in the early to mid-’Sixties to tour the United States and sell their recordings to the American recorder-playing public. Eventually they succeeded in establishing a new fashion. The young American school of recorder-playing emphasized a fine, round, well-supported tone with a vocally-oriented breath vibrato; it regarded the recorder as a kind of flute. The Dutch players in particular cared nothing for beauty of sound or whether a sustained note might rise or fall an eighth of a tone in the course of the performance of one of the exaggerated messa di voce that became so popular in early music circles around that time. The Dutch school introduced the American public for the first time to elements which were soon to become the norm in all too many early music circles: an exaggerated, almost Dadaist perversity of expression, an infatuation with the bizarre, a neglect of good intonation and of beauty of sound, and a cultivation of mannerism and ugliness for its own sake.[footnote 14] All these tendencies had existed before in early music in this country; but now they became accentuated, heightened, and legitimized. The whole phenomenon fitted in very well with the spirit of the times: these were the ‘Sixties, the Vietnam war was in full swing, and everything seemed to be coming apart. The Dutch players and their followers looked and sounded as if they had come out of the movie, Night of the Living Dead; it seemed almost as if they had taken the "spaced-out" drug culture then in vogue as their aesthetic model—as indeed they had.
At the same time or a little later, the established non-recorder-playing early music ensembles of Europe likewise began to become known in this country. These musicians represented a new breed in this country: they were dedicated more to a method and an orthodox ideology than their American counterparts had been. They rejected the relatively easygoing pragmatic approach that had previously been held acceptable in this country in favor of a rigid adherence to doctrinaire historical authenticity, as revealed by the priests of academic musicology and interpreted by the gurus of the early music movement. Some of these ensembles were terrible; others were in fact quite good and worth hearing: but the ascendency of their approach meant almost by definition the end of the recorder’s further development as a viable solo instrument. The historical fundamentalist approach forbade any change in the historical status quo of any musical instrument. This was not perhaps a serious matter for the harpsichord, since both harpsichord-building and harpsichord-playing had attained a supremely great stage of perfection in centuries past; but it was an utter disaster for the recorder and an unfortunate turn of events for the transverse flute. At least there existed a modern flute and modern styles of flute-playing, flawed though they were. There was no modern recorder. And as I have noted above [click here], there had never developed a proper tradition of virtuoso recorder-playing comparable to that which had arisen for virtually all other instruments. The early music movement has achieved much that is worthwhile; but it bears the blame for aborting the emergence of the recorder as a major solo instrument. To this day, one generally hears the recorder played in a very pedestrian fashion, totally without breath vibrato, using techniques that were outmoded and inadequate in Telemann’s time, even for the music of his day. To perform a brilliant harpsichord or violin recital within the confines of strict historical authenticity is quite possible, although it violates the first prerequisite of meaningful achievement in the fine arts, which is the assumption by the artist of total liberty of thought and of action, and total responsibility for one’s artistic deeds. But it is nevertheless possible. The gap between historical authenticity and musical authenticity in regard to harpsichord and violin is relatively small. But to restrict recorder-playing to its eighteenth-century level is tantamount to performing surgery without anesthesia or asepsis because such was the custom in the days of the old masters of surgery.
As a result of the new emphasis on historical fundamentalism, recorder makers began to copy historical replicas and to abandon their tentative efforts toward improving the instrument. Some of the copies were quite good and even superior to the modern instrument in several ways; but they were extremely restrictive in scope. Moreover they were almost all built at "old pitch," a half-tone below modern pitch, and thus unusable in many performance situations. In this way, early music culture increased its exclusivity and descended into a self-promulgated musical apartheid. Now the battle was for territory—for "turf," as Samuel Baron once expressed it to me. It had become unfashionable in many circles to perform Bach on the modern piano; the historical fundamentalists hoped to make it equally unfashionable to perform Bach’s B Minor Flute Sonata on anything but a one-keyed flute built to Kammerton or, rather, to its modern approximation. And performance on a one-keyed flute was not enough; no: it had to be a one-keyed flute played without any breath vibrato at all, by a player who would not dare to use any fingering or embellishment not mentioned by Quantz. Never mind that Quantz advises that "you can considerably improve the tone of the flute by the action of your chest;"[footnote 15] Quantz was no more a member in good standing of the modern early music movement than Jesus was of the Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition. To this day the use of breath vibrato remains forbidden to orthodox early music performers on both transverse flute and recorder. (Do we wonder why the institution of the classical music concert is in its decline? Musician, heal thyself!)
I found myself in a musically-untenable situation. Recorders wear out and need frequent revoicing; the prospects for my obtaining the necessary replacements and service seemed increasingly dim. My recorder was a unique instrument and, on account of the developments outlined above, irreplaceable. I turned once again to the transverse flute.
I renewed my study of the modern flute as a precautionary measure, though in a half-hearted, tentative fashion on account of my continued reservations about its tone quality. Whatever happened, I did not want to leave myself without a means of musical expression. And I had become increasingly frustrated not only with the recorder world but with the limitations of the recorder’s repertoire as well. My Bach arrangements helped make up for the scarcity of good original recorder music, but they were not enough. For me the instrument had become less and less important; what really interested me was the music-making experience itself. I looked with envy at the relatively rich transverse flute repertoire—particularly the flute sonatas and obbligato flute arias of J.S. Bach, as well as the wonderful repertoire of the school of Bach’s sons, to which I felt increasingly drawn. This music required the transverse flute, not the recorder. In particular, the chamber music and solo repertoire of C.P.E. Bach and his circle represented one of the few examples in music history of a first-rate repertoire in which the flute had played a leading role. And hearing Samuel Baron’s work with the Bach Aria Group and as soloist convinced me that it was possible to use the modern flute successfully for the older repertoire.
In 1965 I had had the privilege of trying Otto Luening’s old conical Boehm flute. Dr. Luening, that peerless electronic music pioneer and master musician, had studied this instrument with Alois Schellhorn, a pupil of Theobald Boehm’s pupil Rudolf Tillmetz (who revived the conical Boehm back in 1883, at the behest of Hermann Levi and Richard Wagner), in Munich, the last bastion of the conical Boehm flute, in the years immediately preceding America’s entry into World War I. This experience persuaded me that the conical Boehm flute, which combines the Baroque flute’s internal structure with the modern flute’s system of open chromatic tone-holes and key mechanism, could in fact sound even more beautiful than the Baroque flute, and that it was the ideal flute for the performance of the earlier repertoire. In 1971, I acquired an antique conical Boehm made by Louis Lot.
This event marked a major turning-point in my musical development. I turned more and more to the study of the flute. At my formal 1971 New York debut (which resulted from my winning the Concert Artists Guild competition on recorder and Baroque flute), I performed over half the program on recorder and the rest on Baroque flute and conical Boehm. Within the year I was doing most of my work on the conical Boehm, though I still continued (as I have to the present day) to perform on my older instruments, often all on the same program. My first solo recording in 1973 featured a Telemann recorder sonata, a Quantz sonata performed on the Baroque flute, and works by J.S. Bach and Mozart performed on the conical Boehm. I carried on a correspondence with the late Gustav Kaleve (1884-1976), formerly solo conical Boehm flutist at the Munich Opera, a pupil of Tillmetz, and the last professional to use the instrument before its modern revival. In 1974 Brannen Brothers Flutemakers began to manufacture a series of modern conical Boehm flutes at my instigation.
Despite its beauty of tone, the conical Boehm proved too soft for some performance situations in the real world of modern performers who had been trained to play as loudly as possible. The instrument also had its intonation problems which were never fully addressed by its makers, old or new.[footnote 16] In an effort to achieve greater volume, I adopted a metal headjoint in 1975, which made the sound both louder and more brilliant. Admittedly it also represented a slight but significant departure from the sound ideal of the Baroque flute, but I had to compromise in order remain audible in modern ensembles.
In 1973 I had the honor to perform for Rosalyn Tureck and to win an International Bach Society Performance Award from the precursor of the Tureck Bach Institute. Shortly thereafter I went to hear Dr. Tureck perform Bach in Carnegie Hall on both modern piano and harpsichord. Previously I had always dismissed pianists who performed Bach on their instrument rather than on the harpsichord as anachronistic interlopers unworthy of my attention—with the exception of the incomparable late Glenn Gould, who seemed to my ears to transform the modern piano into an honorary harpsichord. My earlier objections to the piano had not changed (see above [click here]); I agreed, as I still do, with Wanda Landowska that the modern piano’s tone is "somewhat oily."[footnote 17] My favorite stringed keyboard instruments were, and remain, the harpsichord and the German fortepiano. But it came as a revelation to me to hear how Dr. Tureck was able to employ the modern instrument in her performances of Bach in a manner both consistent with the internal logic of the music and capable of revealing certain facets of the music that the harpsichord could not. Specifically, I heard her use the piano's powers of dynamic nuance and cantabile to highlight the relative importance of the interwoven voices of Bach's elaborate polyphony and thereby to achieve an enhanced vocality and structural clarity of expression. More than this—in the final analysis I did not hear a piano at all; rather, I heard great music rethought by a great musical intellect. And that is the only kind of music-making that interests me. Since Dr. Tureck seems so much at home on the harpsichord and clavichord as well as on the modern piano, I could not ascribe her use of the latter to spurious extra-musical reasons of habit or prejudice; there had to be musical reasons behind her choice of instruments. That is for her to explain, if indeed any explanation at all is called for. The significance of my experience for the present discussion is that it strengthened my realization of how relatively unimportant the instrument is by comparison with the artist. If an instrument as different from Bach’s harpsichords and clavichords as the modern Steinway could be made so transparent a medium for Bach’s music, could the modern flute (an instrument far closer to the Baroque flute than the modern piano is to Bach’s keyboard instruments) likewise find a legitimate place in the performance of the older repertoire? I did not make this connection until later, and I had already begun to listen to modern flutists with increasing respect; but the question found a place in the furthest corner of my mind. It was to intrude itself more and more into my consciousness in the next three years.
The softness of the conical Boehm and its intonational deficiencies became more and more a source of frustration to me, and I began to wonder whether it might be possible to come close to reproducing on the modern flute the desirable sound and articulation capabilities of the old conical flutes, thus uniting the modern flute’s superior volume and intonation with the musical virtues of the older flutes. I experimented and found that it was in fact possible to do so by employing a modified Baroque flute embouchure on the modern flute. Not only did such an embouchure result in a tone that in its purity, elegiac sweetness, and emphasis of the fundamental at the expense of the overtones comes very close to the sound of the Baroque and conical Boehm flutes; it also enabled me to articulate on the modern flute with the softness and clarity characteristic of the older flutes, using techniques described by Quantz and Hotteterre. (To this day I use eighteenth-century double-tonguing syllables on both modern and historical flutes.) And so I came to realize that the qualities of the modern flute to which I had objected—its overly-pretty, over-assertive, non-blending, metallic, fizzy tone, its harsh and imprecise articulation, and its exaggerated legato—resulted more from the style in which it is usually played and which has come into fashion since its invention, than from any unalterable qualities of the instrument itself. Boehm himself grew up playing the Baroque flute; we know from his writings and from descriptions of his playing that he used a Baroque flute embouchure all his life; and he cautioned against producing a metallic sound on the metal flute. It is clear that he regarded his invention as an improved Baroque flute. And so I too view the Boehm flute, even though I recognize that there are other musically valid ways of treating it; and I make no claim to any moral superiority on account of my espousal of Boehm’s ideas. In this as in other instances in which I adhere to historical precedent, I do so solely for musical reasons.
In 1976, at a recording session, I had the opportunity to hear and compare the sound of my flute-playing on both conical Boehm and modern cylindrical Boehm flute. The differences in timbre between the two were so slight and the differences in intonation and volume so much in favor of the modern flute that I switched to the latter for most of my work shortly thereafter. For a month I played a modern cylindrical Boehm flute built of wood on account of its resemblance in timbre to the older flutes, until I noted that the instrument seemed to behave erratically in air-conditioned concert halls.[footnote 18] (This is far more of a problem with the modern large-holed cylindrical Boehm flute than with the older smaller-holed conical flutes.) I then changed to the standard metal flute, which I had so despised as a teenager: again the difference in tone quality was quite small and the metal flute’s quicker response was actually closer to that of the Baroque flute. It was difficult for me to overcome my prejudice against metal as a material for flutes and to the machine-like appearance of the modern metal flute; but metal as a material for headjoint linings had been known since Quantz’s time, and I had already grown accustomed to playing on a metal headjoint. I rationalized further that organ pipes had been made of metal for centuries. And the organ is essentially a collection of flutes controlled by a keyboard. By that time, however, my bias against departure from historical precedent had become so attenuated that I would have played a flute of Silly Putty if such an instrument could have brought me closer to realizing the essence of the music.
And so I have come full circle in my flute-playing odyssey—or so it may seem. In reality, I have never abandoned my allegiance to those aspects of the sound ideal and response of the Baroque flute and other old instruments which I believe essential for the musically-authentic performance of the older repertoire. I adopted the modern flute only after figuring out a way to transfer my Baroque flute embouchure and articulation techniques to the modern instrument. Indeed, if one considers instrumental and musical techniques as an integral part of a musical instrument—as I think one ought to do—I have never really switched to the modern flute, nor do I have any desire to do so. And far from regarding the modern flute as perfect, I am in a position to appreciate its very real imperfections, perhaps more than other flutists who lack my experience with older flute designs. I should like to see a series of flutes designed expressly for the performance of the older repertoire: perhaps improved wide-bore conical Boehm flutes (essentially mechanized Quantz flutes), perhaps wide-bore modern flutes as well. (Boehm himself made some flutes of this type.)
Nor have I ever abandoned the older instruments themselves. The past few years have seen improvements in Baroque flute manufacture and exciting new developments directed towards the revival of the four- and eight-keyed flutes. Such developments continue to interest me, despite my reservations, which I shall explain shortly, about the ultimate utility of these early additional-keyed flutes vis-à-vis the conical Boehm. The older instruments have much to teach us. They can help prevent the deadly ossification of the individual musician and the musical community alike by keeping alive one’s critical faculties. I for one consider the study of the old instruments absolutely essential, if only to provide the student with a point of departure, an appreciation of the old masters’ practical performance resources, and a better appreciation of the history, operation, virtues, and defects of all instruments, old and new. Far too many modern flute students regard Boehm’s wonderful invention as a God-given assemblage of sacred buttons and levers; they lack the understanding, appreciation, and critical faculties so essential to true musical artistry. No instrument is perfect: musical instruments are inherently and paradoxically the most defective and non-musical components of musical art. No instrumental type is the monolithic entity that it is commonly believed to be. There were almost as many Baroque flute designs as there were Baroque flutes. And even though the modern flute shows much more standardization than its predecessors, the differences resulting from the substitution of one headjoint for another can sometimes equal or even surpass the differences between one flute design and another.
In short, I have never really abandoned my early music roots, although I have rediscovered some of the early nineteenth-century masters, extended my repertoire to include Danzi and Boehm, and even achieved something of a partial reconciliation with the music of Beethoven and a thorough reconciliation with the music of Schubert and of Brahms, both of whom I revere as musical heroes who rejected the progressive vitiation of musical sensibility that afflicted so many of their contemporaries. Viewing the later repertoire from the perspective of the earlier masters makes all the difference. And despite my espousal of Platonic idealism as a musical point of departure and my opposition to historical fundamentalism, I cannot discount the importance of instrumental design and timbre, and of historical evidence, in musical performance. Most of what we learn from historical sources makes perfect sense. The old masters knew what they were doing: except where they had to deal with extra-musical technological limitations beyond their control (as in the case of woodwind construction), they were usually above reproach and always worthy of study. My objection lies not to historical evidence per se, but to the attempt by some of our contemporaries to use historical evidence as a substitute for musical intelligence and free will. In order to improve ourselves musically it is useful to become familiar with the work of our colleagues, both living and dead. But no amount of historical exegesis can make up for a lack of musical sensibility. Reliance on unassimilated historical data amounts to historical plagiarism; and historical precedent does not in itself justify or forbid a musical course of action. Historical evidence can do no more than serve to reaffirm, or better still, to stimulate, our musical intuition.
As for musical instruments, the instrumental medium is not the musical message, as the historical fundamentalists believe; but it does color that message. The question of which instrument to use for the performance of a given work is not all-important, as the early music historical fundamentalists would have us believe; but it is important as one of the many variables which comprise artistic performance. Pianists go to great lengths to discriminate between this or that Steinway; how then can they or anyone else fail to perceive that the issue of piano versus harpsichord or Baroque flute versus modern flute is a very real one? Would those who declare the choice of instrument to be of no musical importance, who assert that the choice of harpsichord versus modern piano for, say, Bach, is purely a matter of convenience, be willing to condone the use of a harpsichord for the performance of the larger piano works of Schumann or Scriabin? The answer is self-evident, as is the absurdity of discounting instrumental timbre and other temporal aspects of performance entirely. The basic difference between my position and that of the historical fundamentalists is that I regard the question of instrumental choice as a matter not of objective and immutable historical precedent but of personal, musical preference. I base this view on my perception of musical performance as an act of personal creation, rather than of impersonal conservation and restoration. I base it also on my perception of cultural lag as a factor in instrument design, and my consequent rejection of the assumption, so dear to historical fundamentalists, of a categorically close correspondence between instrument design and musical criteria.[foootnote 19] I believe furthermore that the issue is immensely complex and dependent on the particular piece and performance situation in question. There are flute pieces which do not work as well on the modern flute as they do on the Baroque flute. There are pieces which work differently on each: vive la différence! The Platonic spiritual ideal may encompass many different performances of a single work and many different timbres, some perhaps undreamed of by the composer himself. And there are works that sound absolutely appalling on the historically-authentic flute to anyone with a grain of musical sense. And the same applies more or less to the other woodwinds. And while I declare my personal preference for the harpsichord over the modern piano as an instrument for the realization of the music of Bach and his predecessors—a preference that I claim to justify on valid musical and personal, rather than historical and objective, grounds, I must nevertheless insist that the issue remains, and must remain, open, for as long as creative men and women continue to think about music.
A mature and reformed early music movement will come to terms with such issues. It will provide a fertile environment not only for those who wish to rediscover the timbres, tunings, and pitches of older musical cultures and make them their own—and our own as well—but, equally, for those who strive to explore the possibilities inherent in the use of modern or in-between instruments for old music. It will make possible a productive and stimulating synergism among these various and overlapping groups. It will recognize the humanity of older musicians and their cultures and neither fear to cast out modern misconceptions nor shirk from correcting historically-authentic shortcomings. It will, above all, treat itself and the subject of its efforts as aspects of a living art.
In short, it will return to its original and proper function, which is both to revive the old and revivify the new.
There are some signs that this may already be happening. The best of the early music performers not only play better and more musically than they did ten years ago; they seem also less doctrinaire. I heard one well-known early music figure, who shall remain nameless, declare that "Authenticity is OUT!" But there are negative signs as well. The "fight over turf" continues and intensifies as early music extends its reaches further into the nineteenth-century repertoire. The destructive polarization of musicians and audiences into "authentic" and "modern" camps plays into the hands of the public relations mafia (which virtually rules classical music today) and threatens our already-beleaguered classical musical culture. Very real musical issues are obscured by puerile fights over questions of cello end pins.
The old instruments can sound very beautiful, particularly in larger ensembles, in which their unsurpassed ability to blend with one another casts a fresh light upon well-known works for modern listeners accustomed to the sound of modern orchestras made up, all-too-often, of jaded instrumentalists unschooled in the earlier styles of performance. But there are problems. The plain truth is that the public—and the critics—will not tolerate indefinitely the inferior intonation and sonority of the old woodwinds as a replacement for their modern counterparts. The inherent superiority of modern woodwinds to old for the performance of a large proportion of the old repertoire, provided that the modern instruments are played by sensitive artists familiar with the old instruments and styles of performance, was brought home to me at a recent performance of Mozart’s B-Flat Major Oboe Quartet on the modern oboe by a fine musician who has attained virtuosity on both the modern and the old oboe: the tone quality of the modern instrument so contemned by early music opinion leaders left nothing to be desired, while the classical oboe, also used at the same concert and by the same artist, sounded like a toy by comparison. I suspect that the intonational problems posed by the old woodwinds in the classical orchestras now coming into fashion will ultimately be solved by substituting conical Boehm flutes for four- and eight-keyed flutes, and modern Conservatoire oboes with specially-cut reeds and properly-trained players, or even Viennese oboes, for their historically-authentic counterparts. (The modern Viennese oboe retains many of the features of the Classical oboe, despite the fact that it is presently built and played at the ridiculously high central European pitch, in much the same way as the conical Boehm retains many of the features of the Baroque and Classical flutes.) There are very real musical reasons for reintroducing conical flutes of one kind or another into the orchestra: the modern cylindrical flute does not blend quite as well with the other instruments, especially in the orchestrally-used upper registers, as does the conical flute. Oddly enough, this becomes much more a matter of concern in orchestral situations than in solo and chamber music. The need for conical flutes is real and based on genuine musical considerations; the question of which mechanism to apply to the conical flute is in my judgment a matter solely of convenience and of the need for maximum accuracy in execution and intonation. The tonal differences between the eight-keyed flute and the conical Boehm flute are small; but the intonational superiority and enhanced powers of execution of the latter are substantial.[footnote 20] (When the conical Boehm flute was first introduced, one observer remarked that the eight-keyed flute was only fit to be played at a fair by comparison. Another observed that the conical Boehm flute was as superior to the eight-keyed flute as the latter was to the one-keyed flute.) At least this course of action represents one possible approach that ought to be explored, along with adherence to original instruments. I hope it will be; I hope that the early music community will embrace a more pragmatic and flexible approach than it has in the past. If it does not, there may be trouble ahead. If the early-music publicists are able to convince the public that Bach and Mozart must be played on a one-keyed flute and nothing else, they may well dissuade that public from attending concerts of classical music. And there are signs that this may be happening as well. This would be tragic. There ought to be room in the "early music" community for the broadest diversity of views among those who share only a common dedication to the cultivation and furtherance of the spiritual values of the old masters: that is to say, of the spirit of Man in its highest possible expression through music.
Footnotes:
1The question of microtonality as a valid expressive device in eighteenth-century woodwind music, I must emphasize, is not the same as that of mean-tone tuning, which is in fact partly supported by the Baroque flute's intonational idiosyncrasies: the claim that the Baroque flute is better in tune in mean-tone than in equal-tempered tuning is a reasonable one, although its proponents tend to exaggerate both the degree of its validity and its practical importance.[Return to main text.]
2In essence the early music argument runs as follows: If eighteenth-century flute music makes deliberate and expressive use of microtonal inflection in trills and certain other types of passagework in ways consistent with the essential nature of the old masters' musical aesthetic, then the Baroque flute must render such passages microtonally; since the Baroque flute does in fact render such passages microtonally, it therefore follows that eighteenth-century flute music makes deliberate and expressive use of microtonal inflection in trills and certain other types of passagework in ways consistent with essential nature of the old masters' musical aesthetic. [Return to main text.]
3"There are many things in music which, not fully heard, must be imagined." C.P.E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments, trans. by William J. Mitchell (New York, 1949), p. 106.[Return to main text.]
4See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, 1956), p. 330.[Return to main text.]
5See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York, 1983), pp. 344-348.[Return to main text.]
6This is not to imply that the performer must never think rationally or verbally, nor undertake rational musical analysis and historical research as an aid to musical understanding and performance. But I cannot help regarding such analysis as an adjunct to a far more complex musical and emotional understanding, an understanding too complex and too non-verbal to be expressed fully except through music itself.[Return to main text.]
7Ultimately, this is untrue. Music, like the other arts, belongs to the objective, "real" world, the understanding of which constitutes the goal of Science. The sound waves, which constitute the physical reality of music reflect and obey the laws of physics. The human brain itself, which organizes and perceives musical art, does so according to scientific natural principles of biology, chemistry, and physics, which have yet to be understood fully-if indeed the human mind ever can understand itself. And music, even in its most rarefied idealized form, must be considered as yet another facet of the objective universe, like human consciousness. However, the real aesthetic, spiritual content of music, though it does involve the most basic physical principles (as, for example, the rather loose but still real relationship between the overtone series and the consonance-dissonance gradient), nevertheless transcends such principles in their pure and simple application, just as the verbal content of a Morse code message transcends the objective reality of the series of dots and dashes that comprise its medium. Ultimately, of course, there must exist an objective reality of musical aesthetic and structure on both the most simplest and most rarefied levels. Already, relatively simple principles of musical style can be expressed in computer programs. And on the highest level, musical logic must reflect certain natural principles, like the mind itself. If we are ever able to comprehend the mind as a physical, electro-chemical, and biological entity, we may be in a position to begin the study of music as an aspect of this entity. Nevertheless, the important point, as far as the present discussion goes, remains that the scientific study of such principles is, if anything, diametrically opposed to their artistic study. The former constitutes a branch of science, currently in a very primitive state of advancement, and one unlikely to yield information of artistic value. The latter constitutes the practice of music as art, which by its very nature, forbids the application of the objective methodology of science. Even if everything about the scientific basis of musical expression were known, the very nature of music's function would still reserve a place for its artistic pursuit.[Return to main text.]
8Every art requires some sort of balance, some form of control, if it is to function properly. For over a thousand years, the Judeo-Christian ethic-the Jewish monotheistic religion, in its Christian manifestation, enriched by Roman and barbarian paganism-served this function for Western music. The ascetic elements in Christianity repressed and channeled the natural sexuality of mankind; thus, it sublimated it and widened the road for its expression through artistic endeavor. The pagan elements, inherited from the Roman Empire and from the Barbarian invaders, provided avenues for artistic expression in the form of elaborate ceremonies, opulent visual and plastic artistic displays, and sensuously beautiful, yet spiritually compelling music. This music could comprehend both the blatant sexuality exemplified by the harpsichord cadenza of J.S. Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and the ascetic mysticism of this same composer's mensuration canons and numerology. In short, Christianity balanced the Apollonian against the Dionesian; it insured that European musical art became neither hopelessly rigid nor hopelessly uncontrolled. The resultant tension between the sensual and the spiritual—between paganism and Judaism—embodied in Christianity—fomented the development of that complex blend of sensuality, asceticism, and intellectuality that constitutes the musical heritage of Christian Europe, and which remains one of the greatest of Man's achievements.[Return to main text.]
9Christian culture has been guilty of many crimes, great and small; but its nurture, support, and loving cultivation of Western classical music-making for well over a thousand years must go down in history as one of its supremely great accomplishments-perhaps as its greatest accomplishment, or so I believe. (This tradition of subsidy for Music and the other arts by the Christian establishment is one that appears to have escaped the notice of the latter-day religious right.) For all its perversions and distortions, Christian European culture carried within itself a powerful ethical force (even if this force was, as often as not, honored in the breach, as the saying goes); and no other product of this culture exemplified this force as clearly and with such frightening intensity as did its music. The music of Christianity not only embodies Christianity at its best; it also transcends its religious basis to epitomize what is good about mankind as a whole. I do not mean to imply that the old-fashioned pre-Enlightenment Christianity provides the only possible environment for the cultivation of a truly viable musical culture; I hold quite the opposite view. The social and political evils of the ancien régime and of the old Christian establishment upon which it rested were so numerous and multifaceted as to defy comprehension; and I for one would not care to see either restored to their old positions of unchallengeable supremacy; they were responsible for far too much bloodshed, oppression, ignorance, and misery. But the old pre-Enlightenment culture also embodied valid spiritual values; and these spiritual values are not only compatible with modern scientific and industrial civilization but absolutely necessary, not only for the cultivation of true art but ultimately for the welfare of mankind. In the absence of such values, we have seen the Nazi Holocaust, the Communist oppression and mass murders—and the virtual destruction of one of European civilization's greatest gifts to the world: its musical culture as a living, ongoing organism. One cannot deny that the Holocaust had its roots partly in the ancient Christian hatred of the Jews; but I cannot help thinking that it grew out of the political counterpart of the same mentality that denies the ineluctable power of the consonance-dissonance dichotomy and of vocally-rooted melody in music. Let us not be confused by the Nazis' hatred of atonality; they hated it for the wrong reasons: not because it is antithetical to true musical communication on the highest possible level, but because it is quite incidentally equally destructive to musical communication on any level whatsoever, including the most vulgar, politically subservient level.[Return to main text.]
10See Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986), pp. 32-33.[Return to main text.]
11For an interesting attempt to explain the underlying nature of Nazism and of modernism in general in terms similar to those which I have suggested here, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring (Boston, 1989).[Return to main text.]
12Daniel Waitzman, "The Bell Key," The American Recorder, Vol. IX, No. 1 (Winter 1968), pp. 3-6.[Return to main text.]
13Daniel Waitzman, The Art of Playing the Recorder (New York, 1978).[Return to main text.]
14The Dadaist element in much, though not all, modern early music culture has been neglected by observers, as has the presence of elements of "Camp," as enunciated in Susan Sontag's essay, "Notes on 'Camp.'" (Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, New York, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1986, pp. 275-292.) The early music movement incorporates such aberrant aspects of modernism partly because it is so much a product of modern culture (see above, p. 1). Some of Miss Sontag's characterizations of Camp apply with equal force to much modern early music activity. For example: ". . . The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric. . . ." (p. 275). "Camp is the triumph of the epicene style." (p. 280). "Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling." (p. 287). One aspect of the "Campiness" of modern early music society is its apparent obsession of some of its members with the French Baroque chamber music repertoire, which is perhaps, of all the old musical styles, the most flawed emotionally and the weakest musically-as was recognized by its original exponents themselves. (In making this statement, I must except the fine chamber music repertoire of Rameau, Couperin, and certain other masters.) Such dysfunctional aspects of the early music movement stem largely from its projection of modernist elements upon the musical culture of the ancien régime. (See notes 8 and 9 above (pp. 1-1.)[Return to main text.]
15Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, trans. by Edward R. Reilly (New York, 1966), p. 59.[Return to main text.]
16I believe that these problems could be corrected to the point where the conical Boehm would be almost as well in tune as the best modern cylindrical flutes. I believe also, that doing so might involve abandonment of the ring-key system in favor of modern covered keys, even though I, for one, prefer the mechanical simplicity and feeling of greater personal control afforded by the traditional ring keys. I am familiar with a conical Boehm flute with covered keys: it plays remarkably well in tune.[Return to main text.]
17Denise Restout and Robert Hawkins (ed.), Landowska on Music (New York, 1969), p. 130.[Return to main text.]
18Boehm's first modern cylindrical flutes, made in 1847, were built of metal; wooden cylindrical Boehm flutes were not made until 1848, when the French built some for players wishing to retain as much of the old sound as possible. The wooden cylindrical flute can sound very beautiful, and its resonance and the ease with which its tone-holes can be undercut makes for an instrument which, if anything, is acoustically superior to the metal flute; but the inherent instability of wood as a material for a large-holed flute with elaborate key mechanism, and the more sluggish response of wooden instruments combined with the inherently slower response of the modern cylindrical bore and quasi-parabolic headjoint, have historically militated against the possibility of modern flutes of wood ever regaining their former popularity-although certainly they do not exclude this possibility. Indeed, since this essay was written, Mr. Christopher Abell of Asheville, North Carolina, has, aided by the advice of Brannen Brothers Flutemakers, gone into production with a line of wooden cylindrical flutes which utilizes recent advances in flute design and which amounts to a re-invention of the wooden modern-bore Boehm-system flute. At the time of this writing (1995), I find myself using one of his instruments for most of my work, at the insistence of my colleagues. It has so far proven as stable as a metal flute.[Return to main text.]
19The history of the flute offers a clear refutation of this assumption. Historical fundamentalists commonly argue, for example, that the additional keys for the semitones outside of the D Major scale, which began to appear on flutes in the second half of the eighteenth century, were invented to accommodate increasing chromaticism in musical styles. In point of fact, J.S. Bach carried chromaticism just about as far in complexity as it could be taken without vitiating tonality and melody itself, and this during the era of the one-keyed flute. If anything, musical styles prevalent during the era of the four-to-eight-keyed flutes-that is from about 1770 through 1832-show a simplification in this respect, at least as far as the flute repertoire is concerned. It is true, of course, that after the additional keys became standard equipment, composers took advantage of the resources they afforded to write passagework that was all but unplayable on the Baroque, one-keyed flute. But then they had done so before, though not with the same frequency. The plain truth of the matter is that there is no rational musical explanation for the emergence of four-keyed and eight-keyed flutes in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, rather than in its first quarter or its second quarter—or in the sixteenth century, for that matter. The likely explanation is a non-musical one: that one or more enterprising flute makers just happened to add the keys around 1760 or so (and experiments had been conducted as early as 1705: see the well-known painting by Robert Tournières [1667-1752], now in the National Gallery in London, which depicts a Baroque flute of the earliest three-piece design with keyless semitone holes for F and G#) and a host of less-enterprising makers followed suit. The same thing has happened in our own time with the Cooper Scale and Cooper headjoint designs.[Return to main text.]
20At least in theory the eight-keyed flute must be by far the most subtle of all flute designs, in that it liberates the player not only from the tyranny of the Baroque flute's enforced cross-fingering and the sometimes chaotic sonority that results, but also from the benevolent despotism of enforced plain-fingering and equal sonority of the Boehm system. The eight-keyed flute offers not only new plain-fingered alternatives to the old cross-fingerings (which remain available on small-holed eight-keyed flutes), but brand-new cross-fingered alternatives to the old plain-fingered notes: thus, it boasts a fingering vocabulary as rich as that of the recorder. The flute reached its greatest popularity in its eight-keyed form. In practice, many of the eight-keyed flute's subtleties are lost in the arena of practical public performance, or worse, overshadowed by the instrument's technical deficiencies described above. Nevertheless, the revival of these additional-keyed flutes represents a most welcome development.[Return to main text.]