Against Taruskin "Authenticity": Needed for Understanding but not Performance

Taruskin goes into depth on practices of how to actually embody the "authentic" troubadour, especially in performance. I agree with Taruskin in the fact that a "historical authentic performance" is necessary, however, I don't agree that it is the main/only way performers should be allowed to express their performance. With ties to our classroom discussion and meeting with the musicians, we were able to see all the ambiguities that goes into performing historical performances in a modern era. Because the troubadour's poems were heavily undocumented, a lot of assumption are made when deciding how to display their pieces in a way that is similar to how it was originally performed by the troubadours. Here is where Taruskin's argument becomes important. We need to have a historically authentic analyzation of the poems in order to establish some type of base that many scholars can agree with, because, as Marisa mentioned, this is not just music anymore, it is science. We also saw this in class when the musician said that after she used her own knowledge on how she believes a certain piece should be performed, she checked on Youtube or other online resources to see how others interpreted it. She also mentioned that for certain songs there was always a common pattern between all the performers. This common pattern comes from the importance of the tying in history such that the performance feels as it was made to feel, again emphasized by Taruskin.My main issue comes with the sternness of Taruskin as he argues over the importance for a historically authentic performance to a point that ANY deviations from the historical context of the time when the song was made results in an incorrect/faulty performance. This is simply not true. We must realize that even with all historical context being put into place when performing a trobar (song written by a troubadour/trobairitz), modern performers will still need to improvise certain aspects of the performance. This is mainly because most poems in chansonniers didn't include things like pitch, tone, tempo, etc. that are included in modern scores. When making these guesses, what then should a modern performer think off? My answer would be the modern audience.The troubadours performed their pieces in a way that suited their illiterate audiences who also didn't know many other aspects of music that we use today. How a modern audience receives a performance is a lot different from how the people of 11-13th century France did. We are more literate. We know various music stylings and harmonies. We listen to rhyme and rhythm, but we also are able to pay attention to more complex performance aspects. Because of all this, modern performers should be allowed to add more modern aspects to a performance of a historical piece simply because the end goal isn't just the performance but also the deliverance of whatever message the author was trying to get out.Though Taruskin provides a clear way for performing (delivering the message) by staying strictly within the bounds of the historical context, we must not allow ourselves to be ignorant. The fact is, that now, there are more ways to deliver a message through a performance then there was in during the 11-13th century. Not allowing performers to access these modern performance aspects simply because they are out of a historical context may create grounds for a misdelivered message to a modern audience.