The Museum of Historically Informed Musicking by Danielle Older

We, the founders of this institution, are a group of five research masters students at Maastricht University who for the past two months have each undertaken a research project. While each project is quite distinct in character, they are thematically bound by an examination into musical cultures. Our starting point was exploring how different musical actors translate aspects of complex historical cultures in order to create new cultures of performance and listening for the twenty-first century. We each sought, within the parameters of our own personal interests, to explore what musical practices consist in; how they are contingent upon social and historical contexts; what assumptions may underlie contemporary attempts to reconstruct musical cultures from the past; how these assumptions may manifest themselves materially. What you see beyond these doors is the culmination of these efforts; a unified exposition of our individual projects. The name of our museum is an amalgamation of the practice of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) and Christopher Small’s concept of “Musicking” (1988). In Small’s view, music is not to be conceived as a static object, but rather as a dynamic process. Small substitutes the noun ‘music’ with a verb ‘to music’ to indicate that music cannot be simply located in any score, instrument or text, but can be thought of as any human activity relating to music performance that takes place in temporal and spatial dimensions. We do not intend to present this collection of “old ideas” as definitive or closed, but as a discursive insight into a “novel”, if not strictly new, self-reflexive manner of observing and practising the presentation of research on the matter. The aim of the collection is not to conclude, but to stimulate and develop discussion into the future, from the past. The Museum of Historically Informed Musicking therefore proudly presents an interconnected collection of artefacts, activities, relationships and locations involved in historically informed musicking; a fusion of the past and present.

The changing nature of HIP: towards the consolidation of a (new) experimental approach

Reflecting on my improvisational experience with the replica of the medieval organ at the Orgelpark (you can read it here), I hypothesize that I would not have enjoyed the same degree of liberty in the historical context of the German composer Paul Hindemith. Indeed, his historicist attitude during the commemoration of the year of Bach’s death in 1950 led him to believe that if we wish to experience the original sound of Bach we need to objectively study how the instruments from his era were built and played: only by doing so we can wish to experience a similar listening effect and honor the composer’s intention (Sherman, 2003). A decade after Hindemith, musicians and historians started to play music on period instruments and to investigate scientific documents about past musical cultures (Butt, 2004). From this the practice of historically informed performance (hereinafter HIP) developed with the aim of reproducing ‘authentic’ sounds and performances of earlier eras through period instruments. By contrast, these practices were heavily criticized by Theodor W. Adorno from the early-1950s who believed that only through the “‘progressive’ modern performance resources contemporary societies could reveal the full import of Bach’s music” (Butt, 2004, p. 4). Here lies the assumption that even the most accurate reconstruction of past instruments will not allow us to understand Bach, because contrarily to what Hindemith thought, Bach was certainly not content with the means of production of his time but conversely “stood head and shoulders above the pitiful concerns of its own age” (ibid.). This pessimistic diagnosis was later echoed by Pinchas Zukerman who argued that “the thought that the shrill and rasping Baroque organs are capable of capturing the long waves of the lapidary, large figures is pure superstition. Bach’s music is separated from the general level of his age by an astronomical distance” (Butt, 2004, p. 243). Nevertheless, according to Butt (2004) this traditional approach to HIP persisted almost unchanged until the early 1990s when HIP scholars and musicians started to realize that “instead of reaching some sort of understanding with the composer, HIP in its orthodox mode dealt mainly with empirical evidence, thus substituting objectivism for subjectivism, relativism for critical appreciation” (p. 8).

All the interviewees at the Orgelpark followed this point by agreeing that it is practically impossible to know exactly the sound of Bach or experience the exact same listening effect of earlier eras. Peters (2009) pointed out that in the process of restoring an existing organ something is inevitably lost. In order to reconstruct historical sound qualities from the past, one must look at how ancient organs were built. The problem is that as the result of bad restorations, many original parts of these ancient organs have been modified or destructed: we will never thus be able to know exactly how these organs were built if we wish to reproduce the original sound. There seems to be an understanding that scientific practices alone will never be able to serve the purposes of recreating an authentic sound. Hans Fidom adds to this his explicit criticism to whoever claims to be able to produce an authentic sound: “any pretention that I can perform the world of Bach in an authentic way to say as if he himself would play is in fact intolerable”, and again, “They [referring to the adherent of the orthodox approach to HIP] pretend to be authentic but they don’t really try to understand. Not at all! But that’s the obligation, you should try as good as possible and then be very humble as soon as you enter the organ bench” (Interview with Hans Fidom). Johan Luijmes also indicates that attempting to imitate exactly the sound of Bach with an excessive objectivism and empiricism would inevitably lead to a detriment of the listening experience:

“The way my teachers used to deal with past musical cultures has nothing, or very little to do with music. It has only to do with how they thought people have played. For the people who were not interested in authentic practices they found it strange. Those HIP practitioners stopped playing music for aesthetic purposes and only thought about how it was played in the past without caring about the listening effect. I was educated in this fashion (that strongly aimed at authenticity) but now I am much more liberal in how people play Bach” (Interview with Johan Luijmes)

It is thus possible to notice an acknowledgment that the orthodox approach to early music practices not only inevitably entails problems related to the limited scientific documentation available about how organs from the past were built or performed - and, as a consequence, the impossibility to reconstruct an authentic sound exactly as it was originally perceived - but also raises doubts about the usefulness for contemporary audiences of an approach that seeks to imitate certain aesthetic qualities inherent in ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ sounds or performance practices. The concerns expressed by Johan Luijmes reveal that many previous attempts to reproduce an authentic sound as well as performance practices have focused too extensively on emulating technical and stylistic aspects of past performances and often failed to create new cultures of listening and performance with a present significance for contemporary performers and listeners. To be precise, I do not mean that all previous HIP practices followed this orthodox approach based only on objective researches of scientific documents. As Sherman (2003) argues there have been attempts in the past to experiment with sounds through period instruments. I intend, following Butt (2004), that the general tendency amongst the first HIP practitioners was to be more attentive to objectivist and empiricist historical reconstructions of the past. Instead, as the dual goal of the Orgelpark implies (you can find more on this here), the project team will not only attempt to reproduce the sound qualities of an organ that would potentially by approved by Bach but put particular emphasis on the innovative nature of the sound that they intend to create. In a recent article Peters (2014), referring to the new Baroque organ that the Orgelpark plans to build, describes it as a “‘hyperorgan’ that provides the organ player and the composer with a range of yet unheard sounds and possibilities” (p. 4). He continues by explaining in which ways the new organ could potentially innovate the contemporary musical scene:

“The new Baroque organ translates aspects of complex historical musical cultures in order to create new cultures of performance and listening for the twenty-first century. Not only will the organ offer the possibility to play every pipe individually in any combination through the MIDI console, it will also be wired so that it can be amplified electrically. An aspect of the design plan is to have loudspeakers in the organ case. This enables the somewhat mind-boggling situation where the organ pipes could be sampled to give the organist or the composer the possibility to combine the material sound of the organ with the digital samples that can be manipulated. […] This combination of the material and digital might be one of the more defining aspects of the musicking practices that could evolve around the new Baroque organ” (p. 10)

I believe that a new aesthetic mentality characterizes the approach of the project team of the Orgelpark to early music. My claim is that this aesthetic episteme is a protraction of an aesthetic attitude that firstly emerged when avant-garde artists attempted to give new meanings to artistic practices more than a century ago. Moreover, I agree with Buzatu (2014) when she claims that “if we are asked to concentrate thousands of pages devoted to the avant-garde phenomena and label them with a single […] term, that would be experimentalism” (p. 3). Thus a new, experimental approach is emerging within HIP practices, one that does not seek to recreate historical musical cultures through imitation but rather, through personal “non-mimetic, defamiliarized, and innovative” interpretations of the past (Buzatu, 2014, p. 5). With these new considerations it now becomes clearer why the people that on that May 3^rd were attending the symposium at the Orgelpark welcomed my ‘strange’, experimental way of performing with the replica of a period instrument.

Experimentalism in fact substitutes the search for beautiful ‘authentic’ sounds to be judged according to certain aesthetic criteria with the consideration that the recreation of historical musical cultures is not a goal in itself, but is a learning process. This is meant both for understanding the intentions of the original creator of the artwork in his context – in this case would be trying to understand Bach and not only the greatness of his music – and, perhaps most importantly, for self-understanding, namely understanding ourselves and the reality that surrounds us here and now (Duchamp, 1957). The world in which we live in is indeed incredibly different from the one in which Bach wrote his music: it is much more diversified and characterized by the widespread “recognition that we are confronting with many levels of reality” (Buzatu, 2014, p. 5). For this reason, experimentalism would better fit our historical context, since, as Buzatu (2014) argues, “through experimental exercises, different versions of reality become co-present and the intrinsic polymorphism of our world is revealed. The experiment – scientific or artistic – is the most radical re-vision of reality” (p. 5). In another section, I have tried to seize two experimental strategies from the works and writings of Marcel Duchamp that HIP practitioners could adopt in order to innovate with tradition.

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