Historically informed performance
Historically informed performance (also referred to as period performance, authentic performance, or HIP) is an approach to the performance of classical music, which aims to be faithful to the approach, manner and style of the musical era in which a work was originally conceived.
It is based on two key aspects: the application of the stylistic and technical aspects of performance, known as performance practice; and the use of period instruments which may be reproductions of historical instruments that were in use at the time of the original composition, and which usually have different timbre and temperament[1] from their modern equivalents. A further area of study, that of changing listener expectations, is increasingly under investigation.[2]
Given no sound recordings exist of music before the late 19th century, historically informed performance is largely derived from musicological analysis of texts. Historical treatises, pedagogic tutor books, and concert critiques, as well as additional historical evidence, are all used to gain insight into the performance practice of a historic era. Extant recordings (cylinders, discs, and reproducing piano rolls) from the 1890s onwards have enabled scholars of 19th-century Romanticism to gain a uniquely detailed understanding of this style, although not without significant remaining questions. In all eras, HIP performers will normally use original sources (manuscript or facsimile), or scholarly or urtext editions of a musical score as a basic template, while additionally applying a range of contemporaneous stylistic practices, including rhythmic alterations and ornamentation of many kinds.[1]
Historically informed performance was principally developed in a number of Western countries in the mid to late 20th century, ironically a modernist response to the modernist break with earlier performance traditions.[3] Initially concerned with the performance of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, HIP now encompasses music from the Classical and Romantic eras. HIP has been a crucial part of the early music revival movement of the 20th and 21st centuries, and has begun to affect the theatrical stage, for instance in the production of Baroque opera, where historically informed approaches to acting and scenery are also used.[4][1]
Some critics contest the methodology of the HIP movement, contending that its selection of practices and aesthetics are a product of the 20th century and that it is ultimately impossible to know what performances of an earlier time sounded like. Obviously, the older the style and repertoire, the greater the cultural distance and the increased possibility of misunderstanding the evidence. For this reason, the term "historically informed" is now preferred to "authentic", as it acknowledges the limitations of academic understanding, rather than implying absolute accuracy in recreating historical performance style, or worse, a moralising tone.[5][4]
Reception[edit]
In his book, The Aesthetics of Music, the British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that "the effect [of HIP] has frequently been to cocoon the past in a wad of phoney scholarship, to elevate musicology over music, and to confine Bach and his contemporaries to an acoustic time-warp. The tired feeling which so many 'authentic' performances induce can be compared to the atmosphere of a modern museum.... [The works of early composers] are arranged behind the glass of authenticity, staring bleakly from the other side of an impassable screen".[41]
A number of scholars see the HIP movement essentially as a 20th-century invention. Writing about the periodical Early Music (one of the leading periodicals about historically informed performance), Peter Hill noted "All the articles in Early Music noted in varying ways the (perhaps fatal) flaw in the 'authenticity' position. This is that the attempt to understand the past in terms of the past is—paradoxically—an absolutely contemporary phenomenon."[42]
One of the more skeptical voices of the historically informed performance movement has been Richard Taruskin. His thesis is that the practice of unearthing supposedly historically informed practices is actually a 20th-century practice influenced by modernism and, ultimately, we can never know what music sounded like or how it was played in previous centuries. "What we had been accustomed to regard as historically authentic performances, I began to see, represented neither any determinable historical prototype nor any coherent revival of practices coeval with the repertories they addressed. Rather, they embodied a whole wish list of modern(ist) values, validated in the academy and the marketplace alike by an eclectic, opportunistic reading of historical evidence."[43] "'Historical' performers who aim 'to get to the truth'...by using period instruments and reviving lost playing techniques actually pick and choose from history's wares. And they do so in a manner that says more about the values of the late twentieth century than about those of any earlier era."
In her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, Lydia Goehr discusses the aims and fallacies of both proponents and critics of the HIP movement.[44] She claims that the HIP movement itself came about during the latter half of the 19th century as a reaction to the way modern techniques were being imposed upon music of earlier times. Thus performers were concerned with achieving an "authentic" manner of performing music—an ideal that carries implications for all those involved with music. She distills the late 20th century arguments into two points of view, achieving either fidelity to the conditions of performance, or fidelity to the musical work.[44]
She succinctly summarizes the critics' arguments (for example, anachronistic, selectively imputing current performance ideas on early music), but then concludes that what the HIP movement has to offer is a different manner of looking at and listening to music: "It keeps our eyes open to the possibility of producing music in new ways under the regulation of new ideals. It keeps our eyes open to the inherently critical and revisable nature of our regulative concepts. Most importantly, it helps us overcome that deep‐rooted desire to hold the most dangerous of beliefs, that we have at any time got our practices absolutely right."[45]
What is clear is that a narrowly musicological approach to stylistic reconstruction is both modernist in culture and inauthentic as a living performance, an approach termed "deadly theatre" by Peter Brook.[46]