Abstract

After the publication of my book Authenticities in 1995 I began toreceive criticisms of it based on the growing currency of the phrase ‘the historically informed performance’, which was supposed to be describing a kind of musical performance that differed significantly from the kind that had been known previously as the ‘historically authentic performance’ and which had been the object of my critique in the book. The argument was that the historically informed performance was different enough from the historically authentic one to evade my critique while enough like it to retain its ‘historical spirit’. Through a series of analyses of the concept of the historically informed performance, I tentatively conclude in the present paper that, construed one obvious way, the concept does indeed evade my critique, but at the cost of losing, so to speak, its historical credentials and, construed in another obvious way, the concept of the historically informed performance simply collapses into the concept of the historically authentic performance. In neither case is philosophical progress made, but what we are involved with here is a classic case of what the late Charles Stevenson called a ‘persuasive definition’.