It's not just scholars/researchers who feel that way, Ian! I'm sure as a performer you recognise the feeling of your musical ideas developing and refining even as you might be reaching what you originally thought they were. The more music I play, the "better" I get at it, the higher my standards for myself get. On bad days it can actually feel like I'm getting worse, because the gap between what I can do and what I want to do gets wider.
On good days, though, that feeling that there's always more to learn is very exciting - we're never "done." Developing the judgement to know when we've "done enough for now," or "done enough to stand firm by our opinion (but without become so rigid we can't accept that it may change in the future should new evidence come to light)," is the tricky part.
I absolutely know what you mean, strina, and it's why two concepts concerning performance really irk me - one being the idea of the 'definitive performance', the other the idea of something simply becoming 'repertoire' (i.e. so it can just be taken out of the bag and reproduced whenever needed). Both concepts deny the possibility that there is always more to consider, more to appreciate, in a work (in a good one, at least) than can ever be encompassed in one performance or series of performances - and sometimes this might involve jettisoning or negating aspects of performance that have become relatively ingrained either for oneself or more collectively within a field of performance practice.
Every performance (and every composition) is really a case of having 'done enough for now' (well, one can also not have done enough, of course); it's about arriving at a 'stopping point' prior to actually performing something, rather than a definitive conclusion.
The same is true for scholarship - in any area of interest, it's highly unlikely that any work will provide definitive closure on that whole field of enquiry. My own current research also takes me into the field of the Third Reich, the most written-about and studied period in history (a 2000 bibliography listed 37 000 books on the subject, and there have been many more since then), yet one about which we by no means know 'everything there is to know'. Music in the Third Reich has only developed a sustained body of enquiry since the 1980s (with the publication of Fred Prieberg's important
Musik im NS-Staat), since when there have been less than 10 important books in English and German, and various articles. Mostly these make use of the
Reichskulturkammer files which are in an archive in Berlin (they were referred to in the film/play
Taking Sides - a series of files the Nazis kept on lots of prominent musicians). My area of study is different; I'm looking at composers who hit adulthood at or near the end of the war, so were not yet established as public figures. And as such I'm trying to find out more about each of their childhoods, about the places where they grew up and studied (and how the latter were Nazified), about their membership of otherwise of the Hitler Youth, which was compulsory at the time (but there are no major archives on membership), and generally how their lives interacted with the events of the time and how the latter might have impinged upon their consciousness. Some have talked about this, some haven't; and where they have, the events need verifying. I found an obscure essay by one composer where he referred in passing to being involved with a particular operation in the last years of the war (you'll appreciate I don't want to give too many details away whilst I'm still researching these things) in Eastern Europe; this particular operation remains little known-about; the first comprehensive study only appeared two years ago. From that, attempting to establish the nature of his involvement with this operation is a big task. And my enquiries have led me into studying more about the T4-Euthanasia program, the relationship between the NSDAP and the Catholic Churches, the role of education and science (as well as of course culture) in the Reich, and much much more (and then everything to do with the occupation period, archives for which are distributed amongst the home countries of the four occupying powers as well as Germany - the French occupation in particular is hard to study as the archives remain closed (typical French high governmental secrecy)) - all of which have been studied at great length by a variety of scholars, who arrive at varying conclusions between which I have to mediate. And in most cases I realise there is more left to find out that's specifically relevant to my area, requiring more archival study (which is costly and time-consuming, though very important). Fascinating stuff, but knowing at which point to say I've researched various things enough (this particular dimension will ultimately only encompass a small section of my work) and to leave it at that?
t-p, thanks for your thoughts. In terms of asking colleagues, there are only two or three other musicologists in this country who would really be in a position to answer some of my questions - the situation is different with respect to historians (some of whom have been very helpful), but their focus and priorities are generally quite.different. There are a few others elsewhere (most obviously in Germany) whose help I can solicit; it's not always easy getting this help 'cold', if I don't already know them (in some cases I do, and they've been helpful), and when academics inevitably guard their own work rather jealously at times. In terms of 'finding out too much information', I'm not sure that we necessarily do know more now than in previous times, though it's possible to access certain things quicker via the internet. But this leads to a certain 'Google mentality' involving lots of snippets from here and there with few of them really processed in any depth.
