Performance and Authenticity in the Arts

This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars from music, drama, poetry, performance art, religion, classics and philosophy to investigate the complex and developing interaction between performance and authenticity in the arts. The volume begins with a perspective on traditional understandings of that relation, examining the crucial role of performance in the Poetics, the marriage of art with religion, the experiences of religious and aesthetic authenticity, and modernist conceptions of authenticity. Several essays then consider music as a performative art. The final essays discuss the link of authenticity to sincerity and truth in poetry, explain how performance, as an authentic feature of poetry, embodies a collective effort, and culminate in a discussion of the dark side of performance - its constant susceptibility to inauthenticity. Together the essays suggest how issues of performance and authenticity enter into consideration of a wide range of the arts. Contents
List of contributors
Editors acknowledgements
1. Performance and authenticity Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell
Part I. Performance, Religion, and Authenticity: 2. The Poetics of performance: the necessity of spectacle, music, and dance in Aristotelian tragedy Gregory Scott
3. The confessing animal on stage: authenticity, asceticism, and the constant inconstancie of Elizabethan character Peter Iver Kaufman
4. Art, religion, and the hermeneutics of authenticity Nicholas Davey
Part II. Understanding, Performance, and Authenticity: 5. Understanding music Michael Tanner
6. Understanding music Malcolm Budd
7. Musical performance as analytic communication Fred Everett Maus
8. Performance authenticity: possible, practical, virtuous Stan Godlovitch
9. Why is it impossible in language to articulate the meaning of a work of music? Joseph J. Kockelmans
Part III. Authenticity, Poetry, and Performance: 10. Inauthenticity, insincerity, and poetry Alex Neill
11. Poetrys oral stage Peter Middleton
12. True stories: Spalding Gray and the authenticities of performance Henry M. Sayre
Index.


Edited by: Ivan Gaskell, Harvard University Art Museums, Massachusetts