Tradition, like chocolate, is one of those things that seems to be both good and bad for you at the same time. So should classical-music performance traditions be embraced or rejected? And if the answer lies somewhere between the two, how does one tell the difference between good traditions and bad traditions?

Tradition is not the same as authenticity. After all, most traditions begin life after a work's first performance, and one of the authentic movement's credos is to wipe away the smudgy veneer that has often been layered onto pieces since they were premiered. Though 'traditional' ways of playing Beethoven and Brahms for instance, only arose in the mid 20th-century, there are still people who say they prefer 'traditional' interpretations to 'authentic' ones. And it's often the most conservative of music-lovers who are the hardest to persuade that what they are trying to conserve is not always something the composer actually wanted.

Tradition serves as a powerful link through time connecting both performers and listeners with everyone that has ever played and heard that particular piece. But a desire to recreate the past stifles the spontaneous creativity essential to speak uniquely to contemporary audiences. Tradition can never be new, and our view of a piece should never be fixed. Nothing guarantees the death of an art form more than it not being allowed to grow.

Observing tradition normally means playing things composers didn't write. Many of these originated because performers, thinking they knew better, or believing they'd impress more by changing something, indulged in choices that said more about themselves than about the music. Some alterations served their vanity, others their limitations. These bad traditions can stick for the same reasons. But there are also situations where composers expected to hear something unwritten as a result of the performance practices of their time. Not to incorporate these is equally misguided.

There are also times when an established tradition is the result of valid performance experience, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with pieces accumulating a collective knowledge of how best to play them. Why not benefit from the opinions and experience of history? Walter Lippmann wrote that 'men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned’. Compositions are not museum-like artefacts but works whose meaning is constantly added to – whose composition in that sense never really end.

If performers follow traditions mindlessly, we're simply engaging in what Mahler called 'Schlamperei' – an untranslatable Austrian word lying somewhere between laziness and sloppiness. However if careful consideration brings us to the same conclusions that many generations have done before, there's a special sense of being part of something bigger. It is the questioning thought that lies behind each decision that justifies it. If used, quoting Somerset Maugham, as 'a guide and not a jailor', tradition is wonderful. The problem only arises when you have either too much, or none at all. A lot like chocolate in fact.

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