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.

List of contributors; Editor's 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. Poetry's oral stage Peter Middleton; 12. True stories: Spalding Gray and the authenticities of performance Henry M. Sayre; Index.

This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars to investigate the complex and developing interaction between performance and authenticity in the arts. Subjects discussed include the experiences of religious and aesthetic authenticity, the performance of music, and the dark side of performance - its constant susceptibility to inauthenticity.