Classical musicians in the late twentieth century appear to
have largely abandoned the ambition to compose new and
attractive music. And who can blame them? An indifferent
population with a steadily decreasing attention span has
made up its mind about new music. Kingsley Amis, with
characteristic subtlety, put it best: “Twentieth century music is
like paedophilia. No matter how persuasively and persistently its
champions urge their cause, it will never be accepted by the public
at large, who will continue to regard it with incomprehension,
outrage and repugnance.”

This is no revelation, particularly to musicians. Drawing on
the risk-allocation techniques developed by their brethren in the
financial world, the more adaptable of the musical breed have
hedged the risk of creative downside (i.e., composing a dud) by
simply choosing works by name-brand members of the
canon and devising novel renderings for them, renderings generally
characterized by the spirit of “authenticity.” This so-called
“historical performance” movement is an outgrowth of the interest
in early music which began to flower in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, perhaps as an antigen to the incipient
careers of Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schönberg.

At their best, the objectives of the movement are defensible.
The commentator Marie Leonhardt, for example, has written that
the ideal historical performance should allow its composer to hear
it “at worst, without bewilderment, and at best, with pleasure.”
At another extreme are the efforts of the musicologist Joshua
Rifkin (of ragtime fame) whose anorexic explication of