The Future Of Authenticity In The Art And Music

Introduction

In popular music, the concept of authenticity (from the Latin authenticus, meaning 'coming from the author') is generally connected with how certain forms of popular music have typically been regarded as real or genuine while others have not. Notions of authenticity have been positioned around issues related to historical continuity, artistic expression and sincerity, autonomy from commercial imperatives, technology and production, and the expression of and engagement with the cultures of certain audiences, communities or localities. For critics and audiences, authenticity has often underpinned the way in which popular music has been evaluated and understood. Scholarship has largely avoided resting upon or reinforcing polarized notions of authentic and inauthentic popular music, regarding any claim to authenticity as primarily an ideological construction. According to this view, one form of popular music is no more inherently capable of transmitting 'true' emotion or feeling than another. Hence, current debates around the issue concentrate on how notions of authenticity are constructed, in both the practise and the consumption of popular music.

In Western art music today, the word authentic usually refers to a class of performances that seek historical verisimilitude, typically through using period instruments and attempting to re-create period performance idioms. This paper discusses the future of authenticity in the art and music.

Discussion

A concern with historical performing practices is a by-product of 19th-century historicism and is evidenced, for instance, in the production of critical and Urtext editions, in Mendelssohn's performances of earlier music, in the restoration of plainchant by the monks of Solesmes and in the colourful antiquarianism of Arnold Dolmetsch. However, 'authentic' performance was not to become a central element of Western performance until the 1970s, when it began to prove an extraordinarily successful direction for many performers and groups, encouraged by a buoyant recording industry. (Frith, 263-80)

Can authenticity matter aesthetically, however, when determined only by such obviously non-aesthetic means as documents and the results of scientific tests? If a copy cannot be told from the original or a painting distinguished as of the 16th rather than the 20th century by visual examination, does authenticity make any aesthetic difference? It does, indeed, for authenticity, however determined, provides the classification of a picture as, for example, by or not by a given artist or as of or not of a given period. Such classification is the basis for comparison in making further judgements, and ...