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.

Gould on Technology

“Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. We need only think for a moment of the manner in which the formerly separate roles of composer and performer are now automatically combined in electronic tape construction, or, to give an example more topical than potential, the way in which the home listener is now able to exercise limited technical and, for that matter, critical judgments, courtesy of the modestly resourceful controls of his hi-fi.” (Gould, 1984, p. 92)

Technology in music manifests itself in many different forms. At least in the sense in which Gould often invoked the term, it served to demarcate a set of mechanical and electronic apparatus from “acoustic” ones. The recording studio and its constituent parts (e.g. the microphone, the magnetic tape, the techniques of splicing, or bass or trebel boosting), as well as electronic sound transmission devices (e.g. the radio, the record player, the telephone, or the television) represent some the entities that Gould thought lent themselves to a type of musical performance that was fundamentally different from that enacted in a live setting, both with regard to practical execution and the values embodied. Gould saw technology as affording numerous advantages--including interpretative originality, creative control, and anonymity--that were diminished or negated in the live performance.

In a room that has been designated the label “Artefacts & Instruments”, one may wonder why, in a project dealing with Gould, I did not choose to showcase his piano, but instead highlight the nebulous notion of “technology”. I contend that although Gould would be foremost identified as a “pianist”, technology was his instrument at least as much as the piano. Far from serving merely corrective or archival purposes, Gould saw the potential for technology to offer radically new modes of composing, performing, and consuming music.

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