"Historically Informed" Performance: Who Says, and Why Must It Be So?

I'm currently enrolled in a class that deals with issues of HIP and I'm still on the fence about this. I definitely think that both approaches to the music of the past have their merits, and musicians shouldn't have to be afraid of playing too contemporarily--Stokowski's transcriptions, as you mentioned, are a shining example of the musical benefits of being a little more liberal with interpretation.

Henry: all excellent points, and I wanted to add a few more.

For one thing, historic as to what? The way they premiered Beethoven symphonies in France was different from what Austrian audiences heard. Regional variations were far greater then, before the radio, photograph, and internal combustion engine, than they are today.

For another, most composers were and are probably a lot less resistant to changes introduced by interpreters than many puritanical listeners are.

For another, how do we know certain expressive techniques weren't used simply because they weren't written into the scores? It seems to me that those very techniques would first be introduced spontaneously by performers, and *then* they would find their way into compositions via notation. So if we could back in a time machine, we'd probably find that a lot more was going on than was strictly written down. It was their continued use and growing popularity that probably led to their being introduced into the notation.

And finally the scores themselves are not Holy Scripture. Norrington, Hogwood and Gardiner all claim they are looking at the markings of Beethoven's symphonies, to take just one example, with fresh eyes and the latest scholarship, yet their recordings are markedly different from each other, so much so that even a lay listener unfamiliar with Beethoven in any form could hear it instantly. Who's "right"? Is that even a sensible question?

Of course HIP is valuable in many ways. With the finest recordings I can hear a clarity and rawness that modern instruments and techniques, with their thicker, more glossy sheen, often hide. There's something soul-stirring about a timpani being hit with bare wooden sticks and strings with no vibrato. I enjoy HIP performances oftentimes, but I do so for what they bring to the music in their own right, and not because they're "more accurate" or "correct." We don't refuse to see a staging of Shakespeare unless it's done in an open theater with a standing pen and a thread-bare stage, do we? So why must we hear a Mozart piano concerto only "on a piano like the one Mozart would have played it on"?

You are absolutely right, Henry. Any kind of orthodoxy in anything is wrong. "....the golden tree of life springs ever green."

As an amateur pianist, I have to say that in many historically informed recordings, the piano sounds out of tune. I'd be more willing to listen to these versions if they were in tune.

I remember in the mid-70's, when choral singers thought Robert Shaw's faster tempi in Messiah were something resembling heretical!

I have run the gamut about the HIP question, and have come to the conclusion that, when faced with music of real quality (like the music of Bach and Handel), many musicians apply "rules" to try to make the music do the rhythmic things that it does inside a performing musician's head, but not necessarily on his or her instrument. When playing a baroque period instrument, for example, certain things happen naturally with the sound and the articulation that do not happen on modern instruments. There are up sides to this, and there are down sides to this.

The carrying power of most 18th-century instruments, for example, is certainly inferior to the carrying power of most modern instruments. The modern way of compensating for that problem is to make recordings that can be balanced in the studio (or the computer), and can be played at any volume. It is a misrepresentation of what the instruments sound like in real space, as far as I'm concerned.

The first time I heard, as a young HIP baroque flutist, a Mozart Piano Concerto played on a fortepiano with a small-to-moderately-sized period-instrument orchestra, I was seriously disappointed. The fortepiano player, who was known in Boston as an excellent harpsichordist, could not be heard in the performance space (it was the Boston Opera House). At that moment I longed for a modern piano, so that I could hear the music. Or even for a recording with fortepiano.

As far as performance "style," is concerned, I now find it criminal to dismiss the "musically-informed" interpretations of musicians who performed works by Bach and Mozart during the 1950s and 1960s (and before). Consider Dinu Lipati's Bach, or Richter's (Sviatislav or Karl, for that matter). Consider Milstein's Bach, or Oistrakh's. Consider Clara Haskill's Mozart (or Oistrakh's). Who am I to criticize these musicians who make musical choices that are far more sophisticated than the ones I could ever make?

There are HIP recordings that are wonderful, and the instruments that people have been able to make during that past 30 years are remarkable. The scholarship that brings unknown composers to light is extremely valuable, but the "codification" of what scholars have deemed "baroque style" comes out sounding, as far as I'm concerned, musically one-dimensional. So many young people limit themselves by dismissing the musical wisdom of musicians from pre-HIP generations. I look at them and think "this too shall pass."

I used to be one of those people, until I wised up. I still consider myself a "recovering HIP musician." I play in a Renaissance and Medieval consort because I like the music, and I like playing the instruments (granted, my string instrument of choice in this ensemble is a viola d'amore--because of the tone quality and the range), but you'll never catch me "applying" arbitrary stylistic "rules" on this or any music.

Perhaps there is a place for purists--but that place is one tributary in the presentation of classical music, and not the main river.

The one thing we know for sure is that future generations will think the "original sound" is completely different from what we believe.

On a related topic, I think that lots of great performances need re-mastering rather than
re-creation.