TRAVERSO
April 2001
Published Quarterly" ISSN 1041-7494
Are there any "shoulds" for
traverso playing?
David Lasocki
S I HAVE LURKED ON
the early flute e-mail list
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
earlyflute) and various other early music
lists over the past few years, I have often
come across questions of the type: «What
sort of flute should I1we use for playing
in Bach cantatas?" or «What sort of articu­
lation should I use for playing Handel
sonatas?" We could easily mistake such
questions for ones about practice ofthe past:
«What sort offlute would flutists associated
with Bach have used when playing in his
cantatas?" or "What sort of articulation
would flutists associated with Handel
have used when playing his sonatas?" But
underlying these questions one usually
finds some equation of practice of the past
with practice of the present. The questioner
feels some imperative to copy past practice
as much as possible, and the two kinds of
question «How was early music played in its
own day?" and "How should we play early
music today" become equivalent.
This equivalency of past and present
is hardly surprising, as the historical per­
formance movement was founded on it.
The best-known general book on Baroque
performance practice in the 1960s and 70s,
Robert Donington's The Interpretation of
Early Music, was up-front about its assump­
tion "that early music really is best served
by matching our modern interpretations as
closely as possible to what we believe (on
historical grounds transmitted by surviving
contemporary evidence) to have been the
original interpretation.... [This] may be
called the doctrine of historical authentic­
ity." "Authentic performance on original
Volume 13 • Number 2
+ Editor: Ardal Powell .) Publisher: Folkers & Powell, Makers of Historical Flutes
instruments" was not only an advertising to the question "How was early music
slogan: it was the fundamental tenet of performed in its own day?" Yet I also took
those in the movement. Donington did it for granted that, having found some
immediately concede that there would answers, I would apply them wholesale to
have to be an «irreducible minimum of my own performances.
inadvertent modernization which must Imagine the shock I felt, then, when I
attend our best efforts, simply because we went to a five-hour lecture given by the
can never quite find out what went on so musicologist Richard Taruskin in 1987,
many generations ago." But that has not a lecture soon written up as his famous
stopped many performers from concluding, article "The Pastness of the Present and the
at least for themselves, that ifonly they knewPresence of the Past," in which he made the
everything about how performers played in following points:
the Baroque era, they could produce ideal (1) We have a limited amount of infor­
performances today. mation about performance of the past, and
I grew up with the historical performance the farther back we go in history, the less
movement, searching out original flutes information we have.
(or alleged copies of them), and learning (2) Even when we know certain kinds
as much as I could about the woodwind of performance information from the past,
performance practice of the Baroque era we tend to ignore some of it because it
goes against our modern sensibilities. (To
take an example from early in the 20th
When music, instruments, performance , century, when we do have recordings to
give us a good idea of what performance
style, and players click, the result is was like, string players used a great deal of
portamento, which we hate and therefore
magic. do not choose to imitate.) Thus, even the
most historically informed of us are playing
from treatises. I published an English with some mixture of historical and modern
translation of Jacques Hotteterre's Principes practices that would amaze anyone from
de la flute traversiere (Paris, 1707) when the past hearing it.
I was 21, having translated it initially for This point reminded me ofa provocative
my own benefit as a performer while I was article by Michael Morrow, founder of the
an undergraduate (and before I had any early-music group Musica Reservata, in
training in research). Over the next 15 which he asked: " ... supposing a medieval
years, as I gained experience in research or renaissance listener could hear a modern
and writing, I collaborated with my flute performance of a chanson by Binchois or
teacher, Betty Bang Mather, in a series a Dowland lute solo, for instance, would
of three books on aspects of woodwind he say (I use modern English of course)
performance practice: free ornamentation, 'How can anyone ruin such fine music in
cadenzas (also the subject of my master's this way?'; or would he exclaim, 'What the
thesis), and preluding. And I published a hell is that? Some Moorish barbarity no
few other articles on performance practice doubt.'"
dealing with ornamentation and the affec­ (3) Music is not painting: there is no
tions. My purpose in doing all this research "object" to be "restored," but only interpre­
was to learn as much as possible about tation of an often ambiguously indicated
the historical situation, seeking answers notation. Therefore, using historical per-
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formance practices is not "stripping off
the accretions of the romantic tradition))
to reveal the shining original example
underneath, but simply one kind of inter­
pretation.
(4) There is nothing singularly "authen­
tic" about imitating original performance
styles. Rather, all modern styles are authen­
tically of today. Whether we are playing
on modern or historical instruments,
whether we know a little or a lot about
historical performance practice, we are all
doing "modern" performance one way or
another.
(5) Ultimately, what counts is not
whether a performance is "historically
correct" but whether it moves us in some
way.
(6) Music of the past tended to be per­
formance-oriented, as popular music tends
to be today. What counts in popular music
is how performers make the work their
own. We, however, tend to be work-ori­
ented, worrying about such things as the
"composer's intentions."
(7) Finally, we need to be more creative
in our performances of early music, or we
will lose our audiences.
After hearing Taruskin's lecture and
reading his articles on the subject ofhis tori­
cal performance for a few years afterwards,
I began to wonder: had I been deluded in
believing that it was important to learn
about instruments and performance styles
of the past? Is historically informed perfor­
mance (HIP), merely one of many possible
ways of approaching interpretation, with
no privilege over other possible interpreta­
tions? Meanwhile, as I was pondering these
questions, I began to see Taruskin widely
misinterpreted-as saying, merely, that
HIP people were charlatans who were
trying to pull the wool over people's eyes
about the historical antecedents of their
performances, or else that the HIP has no
value at all. James Richman even accused
him of trying to scupper HIP as revenge for
failing at historical performance himself.
Further along the road, I see the outcome
of Taruskin's ideas as a sense of breaking
from bondage. Liberated by his philosophy,
we can set aside all "shoulds" and pursue
whatever sort ofperformance we like today.
If we love historical flutes and tidbits of
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historical performance practice information,
then we can explore the "historical" track.
If we love modern flutes and hate being
told what to do with historical performance
practice, then we try the "modern" track.
And of course, there are dozens of possible
tracks between these two extremes.
This liberation has extended to my listen­
ing. Once upon a time, I could not stand
to hear Bach played on the piano. Recently,
I was interviewed about my research by
Tibia, the distinguished German woodwind
journal. Asked what music I like to listen
to, I replied: "One ofmy favorite recordings
of Bach is hardly HIP: some transcriptions
of organ pieces and cantatas played on the
piano by Emile Naoumoff, who was the last
student of the great French teacher Nadia
Boulanger." The Naoumoffrecording is one
of those rare interpretations in which the
virtuosity of the performer is placed at the
service of the music in order to bring out
its original purpose: religious devotion. It
is, to use a much abused word, sublime-a
far cry from what Taruskin has described as
Atraverso and aknowledge of historical
performance practice in themselves
guarantee nothing.
"the Enlightened, secularized view of Bach
... advanced by modern scholarship."
If significant results can sometimes be
produced by great performers on modern
instruments, is there any value for flutists
in studying historical performance practice
and playing on early flutes? For me now, the
answer is still "yes," for several reasons. First,
I espouse the general principle of music
education that performers gain immeasur­
ably from anything they can learn about
a piece of music, whether to do with its
cultural and social backgrounds (and how
those backgrounds differ from our own),
its structure (as conceived by theorists of its
own day and those ofour day), or the way in
which it has been interpreted, from its own
day to ours. Second, by playing on historical
instruments with historical performance
methods, we may gain certain insights into
a piece that we could not obtain by playing
on modern instruments with post-romantic
performance methods-particularly, of
course, insights about matters of timbre,
tuning, phrasing and articulation, and
balance. These are not the only aspects
of interpretation that should concern us,
but they are significant aspects, and they
do count for something. Third, by becom­
ing educated, we can also freely choose
our methods of interpretation, avoiding
Donington's "inadvertent modernization"
and in fact making our modernization
quite conscious. The point is not to achieve
historical verisimilitude-the "right" instru­
ment, the "right" performance practice­
but to communicate our understanding of
the piece on many levels.
Last Fall, I lectured on J.S. Bach's flute
sonatas to a group of flute students at
Indiana University-mostly modern flute
players, with a few traverso players added for
good measure. To check whether they were
familiar with the entire group of sonatas, I
played the openings ofall the movements of
all the sonatas on CDs-some on modern
flute, some on traverso. Everyone in the
room laughed at the famous modern flute
player from the 1970s who sounded surpris­
ingly outmoded now. "Too much vibrato,"
a modern flute player shouted out. "Too
wooden," shouted another. How quickly
performance styles change! The audience
also agreed that the performances of the
traver so players were more spirited than
those of the modern flute players, although
for my taste all the performances were
too mechanical. Finally, I produced the
E-Major sonata performed on traverso by
Christopher Krueger with John Gibbons,
fortepiano. You could have heard a pin
drop as the first movement began. This was
Bach playing of the highest order. Chris's
tone was hauntingly beautiful and full of
light and shade. He shaped the melody line
flexibly, with a little rubato, allowing the
groups of free ornaments to fall naturally
and gracefully. I could not bear to stop
the CD, and let it play on to the end of
the movement, remarking that Chris was
the first flutist I had heard with a deep
understanding of the empfindsam style that
Bach employs in this movement. In the fast
movements, Chris played the passagework
in such an articulate and pliable way that
all thoughts of its scalewise origin left my
mind. Throughout the performance, the
sound of the fortepiano was the perfect
complement to the traverso, and John's
how on earth should I ornament those slow
movements?" He simply played Vivaldi on
the flute he owned and ornamented the
slow movements in the way he had picked
up from Italianate performance in England
e BULLETIN BOARD °1

playing was astonishingly sensitive. When
music, instruments, performance style, and
players click, the result is magic. Could they
have achieved such an impressive result
on the modern flute with harpsichord or
piano? I doubt it.
Ironically, our situation today is quite
different from flutists ofthe Baroque period,
who had little choice in their interpreta­
tions but felt no sense of lack. They largely
played locally written music on locally
produced instruments. They would not
have worried for a second about whether
the flute they had was "righf' for the piece,
and they probably gave little thought to any
performance practice that was not imposed
on them by the composer or music director.
Even if a flutist was, say, in England and
he came across the new Le Cene edition
of Vivaldi's flute concertos, he did not say
"Oh, heavens, I must send to Italy and buy
a flute from an Italian maker-tragic that
it's going to take five months to arrive. And
(ifhe was a composer, in effect recomposing
the movements, sometimes in a style far
removed from the original composer's).
As for the "composer's intentions," would
Vivaldi have cared what our flutist did?
Probably not: he was just pleased that his
pieces were selling abroad and he had cut
a good deal with Le Cene. In worrying so
much about how people did things in the
past, we show just how modern we are.
A traverso and a knowledge of historical
performance practice in themselves guar­
antee nothing. They do, however, open up
a way to explore the meaning of a piece of
Baroque music. Yes, we are modern players
engaging in modern performance, but we
are using tools informed by history. Let us
use these tools with insight and wisdom,
ever mindful ofwho we are and what we are
doing, educating ourselves, digging deeper,
connecting with our audiences, never set­
tling for the routine, but growing, learning,
and evolving. ((Should," anyone?
", Discuss this topic in TRAVERSO's online
--
David Ledbetter, "On the manner of playing
the Adagio: Neglected features of a genre",
Early Music 29 (2001), 15-26, music examples at
http://www.em.oupjournals.org.
Mary Oleskiewicz, ''The hole truth and nothing
but the truth: The resolution of a problem
in flute iconography", Early Music 29 (2001),
56-59.
Anonymous, "Interview et Discographie:
Rachel Brown", Traversieres 32/66 (Jan-Mar
2001),51-65.
Luca Verzulli, "Le musiche militari per flauto
e tamburo. I ritmi di accompagnamento:
I'articolazione, la modalita, I'improvvisazione",
Bolletino della SIFTS 5.1 (April 2000), 3-7
Gianni Lazzari, "Due metodi italiani per flauto
del primo Ottocento", Bolletino della SIFTS 5.1
(April 2000), 7-11, with extended quotations in

ia transcription and facsimile.

Reading List . . forum at http://traverso,baroqueflute,com

Gianni Lazzari, "Ritratti di flautisti italiani

Donington, Robert. The Interpretation of Early
Music. New rev. ed. London & Boston: Faber &
Faber, 1989.
Kenyon, Nicholas, ed. Authenticity and Early
Music: A Symposium. Oxford & New York: consort omogeneo di traverse", Bolletino della
Oxford University Press, 1988. Includes Rich­SIFTS 5.2 (August 2000), 3-28
ard Taruskin's article "The Pastness ofthe
Present and the Presence of the Past,"
pp.137-207.
Morrow, Michael. "Musical Performance and
Authenticity." Early Music 6, no. 2 (April 1978):
233-46.
Richman, James. "Taruskin Agonistes: Text and
Act Reconsidered." American Recorder 39, no.
3 (September 1998): 15-19, 38.
Taruskin, Richard. Text & Act: Essays on Music
and Performance. New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
dell'Ottocento: I ritratti del Goldberg. Second a
David Lasocki is Head of Reference Services parte", Bolletino della SIFTS 5.1 (April 2000),
in the Cook Music Library, Indiana Univer­ 44-46.
sity, and a prolific writer on the history of
woodwind instruments. Gianni Lazzari, "Fonti iconografiche italiane del
Recommended Recordings
Francesco Carreras and Alessandro Onerati, "1
Bach, Jean-Sebastien. Transcriptions pour flauti sistema Bergonzoni e sistema Lazzeri",
piano. Emile Naoumoff, piano. [Paris]: Saphir Bolletino della SIFTS 5.2 (August 2000), 29-38
Productions LVC 001006, (p)1998.
Bulletin Board is continued on p. 8
Bach, Johann Sebastian. A Musical Offering;
Sonata BWV 1035; 14 Canons on the Bass-line of
the Goldberg Variations. Christopher Krueger,
traverso; John Gibbons, fortepiano; and
others. Baton Rouge, LA: Centaur CRC 2295,
(p)1997.

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