Constructing Authenticity - Exploring the Relationship between Early Music Practitioners and Authenticity

The role of authenticity in the practice of music production and performance is a central debate in the philosophy and sociology of music. As Nicholas Cook (1998) outlines in Music: A Very Short Introduction, the 'authenticity' debate raged fierce throughout the 1980's. This debate centered on a surge in interest in both the early music movement and a practice known as historically informed performance (from herein HIP). Cook claims that 'authenticity' as a buzzword was fitting in the music world as it packaged two issues at the heart of the practice of performance, particularly HIP. The first, relates to historical correctness, for example the ability to be authentic in reading the intentions of the composer or utilizing period appropriate instruments. The second relates to a broader understanding of authenticity as initially discussed in Greek philosophy and remaining pertinent in philosophy ever since (Cook, 1998). Jean-Jacques Rousseau purported that authenticity is a form of self-realization, only possible within the individual and inauthenticity is an effect of external factors. As Cook states, “In this way, if you played Bach on the piano – if your performance wasn’t ‘authentic’ – then you weren’t simply wrong in a scholarly sense: you were wrong in a moral sense too” (Cook, 1998, p. 95).

In his article ‘Musical Performance and Authenticity’, Michael Morrow states, “even the most sophisticated notational systems are incapable of indicating the essentials that make a performing style: however inspired the music, written notes are mere symbols; a musical performance is an act of creation, and without the performer music does not exist” (Morrow, 1978, p. 235). This statement suggests some of the key issues that pervade this inquiry. If the musical performance is an act of creation in how far can the performer assert their own creative voice when attempting to be historically informed and authentic? Are creativity and authenticity necessarily diametrically opposite (Peterson, 2005)? Or as Goran Folkestad asks, which is more important within the practice of creative music making, the process or the product? Do performers feel a tension between their personal creative voice and the ambition of historical accuracy? In order to construct a performance that is in any way authentic, experience is key, as Hans Keller notes in ‘Whose Authenticity?’, “the heart and source of authenticity is understanding” (Keller, 1984, p. 519). How is this understanding achieved and how is it embodied in a performer?

            The debate surrounding authenticity gained ground into the 1990's and peaked with the publication of two seminal works in 1995. Richard Taruskin's Text and Act and Peter Kivy's Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Kivy structures his argument according to a clear taxonomy of authenticity. These four authenticities reappear in the argument of many authors, including Taruskin and they include; Intention, the ability to interpret as accurately as possible how the composer intended the piece of music to be played; Sound, recreating the sound of the period with a view to period appropriate instruments as well as setting for example; Practice, this refers to the very practice of performing; Finally, Kivy refers to the ‘other authenticity’. He vehemently argues that this ‘other’ is often entirely shunned by the practice of HIP. This ‘other’ he also refers to as personal authenticity. This form of authenticity refers to a “sense of authentically one’s own, emanating from one’s own person – authentic, in other words, as opposed to derivative or imitative” (Kivy, 1995, p. 108).  Taruskin supports a similar view, although rather than discussing personal authenticity he refers to conviction, but evokes a similar sentiment in doing so:

It seems to me that the special opportunity, and the special task, of a movement in musical interpretation that aspires to authenticity is to foster an approach to performance that is founded to an unprecedented degree on personal conviction and on individual response to individual pieces (Taruskin, 1995, p. 77).

This response relates directly to the performer, to their own interpretation of both the music and of their role as a performer. This construal of authenticity is realized by the performer before anyone else and as there is no performance without the performer this provides an intriguing basis for reflection. It is specifically this interpretation of personal authenticity or conviction, done by performers within the practice of HIP that I will focus on in this article. I will first explore in more detail some of the central arguments surrounding the authenticity debate within the practice of HIP. After this initial, theoretical inquiry, in the second half of this article I will turn my attention to a reflection on the thoughts and words of performers with whom I had discussions with for this study. Following Bernard D. Sherman’s Inside Early Music: Conversation with Performers (1997), I will discuss some of the themes explored in the first section with a number of performers from the practice of historically informed performance. I will investigate, from the point of view of the central actors at the heart of this debate, what notions such as personal authenticity mean to them and what role it plays in their own performance practice. Following John Butt’s criticism of Sherman, that whilst he provides an in depth and revealing account of performer’s ideas, the inevitable shortcoming is that what individuals say and think about a subject is not necessarily what transpires in practice. I will therefore also conduct an ethnographic observation of these performers and will combine my observations with the reflections of the performers themselves in order to attempt to add a new perspective to the already dense body of scholarly research in this field.

During the course of this research I had the good fortune to speak to a number of musicians and performers and to observe two rehearsals of early music. I conducted two face to face interviews and had discussions via email with three other contributors. My first observation was of the Schütz-Monteverdi consort in Maastricht two weeks before they were due to perform. As scholar and organist of the consort, Peter Peters outlined to me in our discussion prior to the rehearsal, the consort was founded by Arnoud Arntz who had an interest in forming a consort in which the Baroque trombone could be utilized. The soloists are all students from the conservatorium, as is Yori the conductor, and the instrumentalists are comprised of a mixture of professionals and keen amateurs (See Box 2, p. 12). The second rehearsal I attended took place at The Royal Conservatorium in The Hague. For four consecutive days rehearsals took place of the 18^th Century orchestra with students from the conservatorium, for a concert version of Rameau's opera Les Indes Galantes conducted by the founder of the orchestra and early music pioneer, Frans Brüggen (See Box 1, p. 8 ).

The ‘Other Authenticity’

As we have already noted, this form of authenticity is personal, it is tied up with notions of both experience and understanding and it can therefore be seen as a particular form of knowledge, it can be seen as something that is learned tacitly. In Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy Michael Polanyi claims that"the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them” (Polanyi, 1958, p. 49). In this way, Polanyi inadvertently claims that what he calls ‘tacit knowledge’ evades linguistic expression. He suggests that it is through forms of interaction such as the apprentice observing the master that this type of knowledge is transmitted (Polanyi, 1958).

It is not just about understanding rules, or accurately producing the notes in the way in which you have been taught that they should sound, there are other factors at work here. A skilful performance requires more than an informed performer, it requires a practical knowledge of the art, something that has been observed and experienced. The performer embodies this practical knowledge and utilizes it consciously or unconsciously every time they perform, as Polanyi expands "Rules of art can be useful, but they do not determine the practice of an art; they are maxims which can serve as a guide to the art only if they can be integrated into the practical knowledge of the art. They cannot replace this knowledge" (Polanyi, 1958, p. 50). It is this personal knowledge, this individual interpretation and understanding that informs one’s own practical knowledge of the art and it is this knowledge that can be seen to share much in common with Kivy’s notion of personal authenticity or Taruskin’s sense of personal conviction.

Within the practice of HIP, where can the space for interpretation be found? If historical accuracy is a primary aim then surely adherence to the music as historical artefact is key. Both Kivy and Taruskin explore this issue in depth. They both suggest that it is in the gap between text and act, or music as artefact and act as performance, that this space exists. Kivy is critical of what he refers to as HIP’s implicit project of ‘historical archaeology’. He claims that in trying to completely reconstruct a past that is entirely unknowable the practitioners of HIP inadvertently close this gap, eventually collapsing the performance into the text. As Kivy states:

In general when intentional authenticity seems to mandate a gap between text and sound production, in which personal authenticity may, it is hoped, be achieved and in which sound authenticity, on the contrary, mandates that the gap be closed, by essentially making the “text” flow into the gap, in the form of “historical performance practice,” the historical performance movement standardly opts for the latter (Kivy, 1995, p. 276).

Kivy asserts an overlap between the role of the composer and that of the performer, as the performer enacts the piece, they are also responsible for its creation, for bringing it to life. Or as he states for the ‘arrangement’ of the work. However explicit the composers intentions, however rigid the notational instruction, it is ultimately up to the performer as to how they perceive the piece should be played. He uses Thomas Carson Mark’s argument in The Philosophy of Piano Playing to illustrate that if we consider performers as artists, as the idiom goes, then there has to be room for an element of creation. He goes on to quote Mark, “The performance is not simply an interpretation (thought it requires or involves one) or a presentation (though it requires that too since it includes producing an instance of the work): it is another work of art.” (Mark in Kivy, 1995, p.119). Taruskin shares similar contentions with interpretations of the composer’s intentions, however he goes even further, he states:

We cannot know intentions, for many reasons – or rather, we cannot know we know them. Composers do not always express them. If they do express them, they may do so disingenuously. Or they may be honestly mistaken, owing to the passage of time or a not necessarily consciously experienced change of taste (Taruskin, 1995, p. 97).

Kivy is critical of Taruskin’s attribution of the interpretation of intentions to certain knowledge, however what this highlights is the importance placed by the performer on the decipherment of intentions. Taruskin highlights Leo Treitler’s observation that "the meaning of a text is not fixed within its boundaries but is ever contingent upon the interests and the circumstances of the community of readers or listeners" (Treitler in Taruskin, 1995, p. 32). It is not only an accurate rendition of the text or its interpretation then but an element of artistic creativity in bringing to life, another work of art, which is constituted by the contextual setting of both the readers and the listeners.

This point, highlighting the importance of the work, infers a number of further important concepts, which appear time and again within discussions of HIP and authenticity. Taruskin highlights the Romantic concept of Werktreue, the sense of the timeless work, the artefact of musical masterpiece which alludes to another notion, which Kivy explicitly refers to as the ‘the cult of the composer’. Both of these ideals have their roots in the Romantic period and have continued to pervade Western music history. Many have explored these relations in great detail in order to explicate the historical development of the ‘work concept’ (Goehr, 1992, Treitler, 1982, Burstyn, 1997, Butt, 2004). What Burstyn and Goehr both highlight and which is succinctly summarized by Butt is that “we should not rely on an a priori separation of work and performance”. Goehr asserts that before the dawn of the ‘work concept’, which she dates to around 1800, performance is better understood in terms of event. If this concept is utilized within the practice of HIP, then it allows for the space between text and act to remain. If the text is perceived as an artefact to be enacted not rigidly obeyed, then the performer is able to mediate authenticity by perceiving of the music, the instruments and the setting, including the listeners, as different perspectives through which they can craft the event of the performance. How do musicians themselves interpret these issues? Are they able to approach the music as an event or encounter or do they feel that there is a strong distinction between the work and the performance? Do performers feel a sense of personal authenticity when they practice historically performed performance or as Kivy asserts, is the performance collapsed into the text in the name of historical accuracy? It is to these questions I shall now turn.

Why practice HIP at all?

Antoinette Lohmann, a teacher of Baroque violin and viola and a self-professed fanatical researcher is an advocate of performing contemporary compositions for early instruments and supports the development of a historical performance movement in parts of the world where it has not yet been explored fully. I asked Antoinette to reflect on the purpose or aims that motivate HIP;

There are many things we don't know, and we will never be able to HEAR what they did, so it's just a guess. Something we can find out, if you combine instruments with written sources for instance, it is at times possible to understand the text from the instrument and vice versa. But still we'll never know what it sounded like. It's almost impossible to read and understand outside of our context, we have our own subtext, any period author had his own context as well, and we might either see a subtext that's not there, or it is there but we fail to see or understand it. I think it is basically a modern view on particular music, a view that we can understand nowadays, and if it's close to what was intended, if they at all knew what was intended, we are lucky (Lohmann, Constructing Authenticities, 2014). 

In this passage it is quite clear that historical accuracy is not the priority. Antoinette highlights the potential for dialogue between the artefacts involved in the practice of HIP, the period instruments and the score itself, this reinforces the idea of the musical event or perhaps more precisely, Christopher Small’s notion of musicking. Peter Peters asserted the importance of this notion also, “I think it is incredibly important to understand musicking in early music and that we have to try to forget all these romantic notions about the composition and the composer” (Peters, Consructing Authenticities, 2014). Small coined the term musicking in order to assert that music is a verb and not a noun. He argues that music in an instrument of social construction and is a process not a product of playing a certain note or reading a score. In an article about the historical restoration of churches by Jones & Yarrow (2013), they suggest that authenticity can also be seen from this social perspective, arising in activity at the interface between people and things, they state “authenticity is neither a subjective, discursive construction nor a latent property of historic buildings and monuments waiting to be preserved. Rather, it is a distributed property that emerges through the interaction between people and things” (Jones & Yarrow, 2013, p. 25). As Antoinette suggested it is rarely about the end product or attempts to reconstruct something specific, it is equally about the conversation, the interactions between, among others, performers, composers, scores and instruments.

Can you see the real me?

From my conversations with the performers themselves I got a sense that HIP, for them, is not about reconstructing an authentic sound, it is about understanding, coming closer to the style and content of the music from the perspective of its period in order to make informed decisions. Early music, in particular, is a genre of music that does not appear to fit with Kivy’s diagnosis of the collapse of text into act. In these texts much is not written and therefore a level of interpretation is implied from the outset. What the musicians emphasized to me is that in order to make choices in relation to this interpretation, you have to learn and study and reflect on the practices in the context of the production of the music. As trained pianist and general theory lecturer, Inge Pasmans outlines to me:

If you don’t know where the musician came from, the context it was composed in, what sound was sort of…. Yeah, aimed for… Then you will never be able to make your choices, I’m not saying follow it to the letter, no – but if you don’t know this context then you don’t know the options and the things you can do with that score, because that’s the problem, the score is unreliable and we tend to treat each score the same (Pasmans, 2014).

Seen in this light, HIP provides the tools for greater artistic freedom or personal authenticity. As Henk Guittart, conductor and founder of the Schoenberg ensemble, told me “There is no way of defining the amount of interpretation. In general I think that the older the music, the more ignorant we are, so probably the more choices (interpretation) find their way into the performances” (Guittart, 2014). Inge and I discussed the idea of freedom with the music in great depth, she told me “It’s not like you feel limited in your expression, not at all – I felt a lot more secure I have to tell you” (Pasmans, 2014). She went on to explain how if you do not understand what options are available to you, then you cannot make choices at all. Inge explained to me that you can't play the same as with Schuman or Stravinsky, they were far more exact in what they wrote down. With early music, as there is so little written, it is impossible to just read the text or if you do, you completely miss out on what you can do with the music:

You don’t even realise all the options you have that you are missing out on, you don’t always have to follow them, you might decide that with this instrument it doesn’t sound right or in this hall it is not working because of echo for example, you need to adapt things and that is fine, but if you don’t know these things… then like the teacher just telling you, you let the music just tell you (the notation that is) and you don’t make your own choices because you don’t know what the choices are that are available (Pasmans, 2014).

Inge is asserting, contradictory to Kivy’s thesis, that in performing early music, the practice of HIP actually enables or engenders the possibility for personal authenticity. In becoming historically informed, by studying sources and immersing oneself in recordings, a greater level of understanding is achieved that permits a more informed interpretation. In ‘Beyond the Interpretation of music’ musicologist Laurence Dreyfus reasserts that ‘Music is both an art and a science’, as Thurston Dart eloquently puts it; like every art and every science it has no enemy save ignorance’ (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 269). In an interview from 2013, Richard Egarr, director of the Academy of Ancient Music, talks about the early music movement and the shift towards the reconstruction and utilization of period instruments, he told The Telegraph newspaper “The bad thing was that this went hand in hand with the idea that interpretation and personality weren’t required, which is crazy. There’s always been interpretation – performing music can’t just be about ‘getting it right’” (Hewett, 2013). 

Dreyfus goes on to state that “The great paradigm shift toward historical performance arrived, then, not as the imposition of a radical new method of musical interpretation but rather as a clever annexation of traditional metaphorical territory – loyalty to the work – governed by a new authority – History – to whom performers could appeal” (Dreyfus, 2007, p. 269). What Dreyfus is insinuating is that despite the understanding of content and style that may be achieved through becoming historically informed the performer is still indebted to something outside of themselves, the emphasis has just shifted from the Romantic notion of the work to a new authority, history. In my observations, one thing that struck me in both cases was the degree to which the musicians would constantly annotate their scores. As I sat and observed both rehearsals, rarely would one run through take place which wouldn’t be followed by several instrumentalists picking up a pencil and frantically scribbling away at the large book of music in front of them. This immediately made clear to me the relativity of the text. In contrast to Kivy’s assertion of dogmatic adherence to the text or of Dreyfus’ to history, these musicians were working with the text. It was clear that they were not restricted by the black lines on the page, it was providing a clear guideline, it was setting some boundaries, but within that these musicians were making choices. As Inge told me “the performance rules are very wide and very, yeah… not ambiguous, but they give sort of… the boundaries…” (Pasmans, 2014). She goes on to explain that you have to learn these boundaries, know the constrains that are placed on you by the style and period of the music you are playing, if you understand this then within many sections, improvisation is possible, even called for, such as in the variations of repetitions, here no instruction is given, or rarely, but performers are expected to do something different with each repeat. As Richard Egarr states, “Take something like the violin sonatas of Corelli, the Italian Baroque composer from the generation before Vivaldi. He writes out ornaments for the player, but he never thought people would actually play them. They’re just a guide. He’d expect players to make up their own. What I want to do… is encourage the creativity and sense of risk which makes that possible” (Hewett, 2013). In order to have the creativity and be able to take risks, as Inge highlighted you have to know what is possible, as Picasso famously said, “Learn the rules like a pro, so that you can break them like an artist” (Picasso, 2014).

The Musician as Researcher

Inge described to me her own experience with musical education and she explained how in her own piano lessons she was taught, typically, in a very procedural way. The teacher teaches you their own interpretation, they tell you when something works, when you go too fast or too slow or put the wrong ornamentation in the wrong place. Inge reflects that she had many doubts when she started to do research and wanted constantly to go to her teacher to check if she was doing things right. She comments that now she is so glad she didn’t as “then in the end you really know so much more and understand the style so much better than when a teacher just tells you how to play something” (Pasmans, 2014). We went on to discuss the format of education music students receive more generally. Inge explained that she conducts analysis classes where students learn particular techniques for reading scores and composition classes where they look at the style and technique of certain composers and then attempt to imitate it. With all of my interviewees the notion of the musician as a researcher was a pervasive theme. Henk Guittart told me that in his view “(research) belongs in a natural way to the profession as it is today” (Guittart, 2014). Antoinette Lohmann’s website describes that in her teaching practice she encourages her students to become researchers, to question critically and reflect on their own experiences, in order to “not just unquestioningly follow the established traditions. Just as traditions should be acknowledged in education, ongoing development based on research discoveries ought to be promoted and valued to the same degree” (Lohmann, 2014). For Inge however, this was something new to her following her own musical education, she explains one of her first experiences of research:

IP: So I chose for a very un-famous Mozart sonata and I tried to figure out how I could play that on such a modern instrument and to respect as much as possible or to find a translation, maybe that is better, to find a translation of the intended sound or the performance practice of 1760, when it was composed, and to figure out If I can find some of the sound in the modern piano and flute as well.

DO: And how do you know if you can find that sound?

IP: I guess you can’t… But there are a number of very important sources that you can go to that give you an idea… Some of these famous sources talk about ornamentation technique in that period, they speak about accentuation, articulation, what to slur, which notes to connect, many times it is not indicated in the score which is really annoying… You have to know a lot of things, because you can recognize the characteristics… once you see it… you see the same characteristics you know… Ah - I am supposed to do this here, although it’s not written you know that you are supposed to accentuate something, but you are supposed to know that and they didn’t write it down because everybody knew (Pasmans, 2014).

As Inge highlights here and as we have already discussed, much is not indicated in the scores from the early music period. Performers knew and understood how to read the music and knew the style in which they were expected to play or sing, but this has now been lost. Peter Peters also stressed this when talking about his conductor, Yori Klomp, “he has to find the balance between what people are able to deliver and what he has in his mind, the sort of style characteristics and also he has to make the music entertaining…. He will not choose a tempo that was done back then because we don’t know, but he will choose a tempo, he has very

clear ideas about it” (Peters, Consructing Authenticities, 2014). In a brief conversation with Yori before the start of the rehearsal he also emphasized this point to me directly. He explained that he feels great freedom with the music exactly because so often the score does not give clear instructions, he also stressed the need then for research, he implied that you have to know when you are taking a liberty with conducting, if you know and understand the choices you are making then it can succeed.

Peter also stressed the importance of research to me. He suggested that music students should be educated in such a way that they do not need their teachers to tell them exactly how to do it, if they learn research methods and are able to learn for themselves, they can come up with answers as to why they play this way or that, Peter stresses this is also very important, it is not just about allowing them to develop their own artistic personality. Inge tells me that in her opinion students should start with the master-apprentice relationship, as this provides the technical foundations, you follow the example set for you, learn the techniques, but that then students should be given the space to find their own way of interpreting. She suggests this is done for example by allowing a student several months to work with a piece of music, researching it and experimenting with it in order to begin to learn for themselves and not just follow instruction. Henk Guittart also suggests that not enough space is given to students for discovering and exploring personal interpretation, he tells me that “Most teachers are still educating in order to get clones of their own playing. Without much knowledge or talk about interpretation” (Guittart, 2014).

HIP as a Research Method

Throughout my observations and conversations of and with performers, a genuine desire for understanding was prevalent. With both Peter and Inge we discussed a certain level of immersion into the music as essential for achieving this. Inge explains “Somehow you get a feeling for the tempos and the sounds… and you need the sound to surround you a bit more, because if you are used to other things and you are trying to adapt then you need to listen a lot, but I don’t think that it is unteachable, you have these sources and they really explain very well and the boundaries are fairly well set” (Pasmans, 2014). Peter is less convinced that this understanding is teachable. Whilst there are elements of technique from particular styles of music that, with effort, can be made explicit there are other elements that are less so, here we could use Sociologist Harry Collins’s taxonomy of tacit knowledge (Collins, 2010). His categories of weak or relational tacit knowledge may apply to what Inge describes, where with enough attention and effort, the knowledge may be made explicit, whereas Peter has in mind what Collins refers to as strong or collective tacit knowledge. Collective tacit knowledge, as STS scholar Wiebe Bijker elucidates, is a “kind of knowledge we can only learn by participating in a social world, interacting with other people. This is the kind of knowledge that we do not know how to make fully explicit” (Bijker, 2011). Small’s notion of musicking also asserts the social nature of performing music, this theme arose again and again in my conversations, it is not only about learning the style, it is the experience of performing with the other musicians, of allowing dialogue between the text and the instrument, all of these things result in the musical encounter or event.

Music scholar Rineke Smilde states in Musicians as Lifelong Learners: Discovery Through Biography, “Basically, some knowledge cannot be put into words. Tacit knowledge, that is hidden or latent knowledge, is central to the whole process of coming to know experientially within any practical context. Echoing Polanyi, the creative energy or spirit embedded in tacit knowledge can only be caught and not taught” (Renshaw, 2006 in Smilde, 2009, p.68). The process of musicking is how these musicians and performers come to know experientially, the context of the practice of HIP is just one lens through which they do that.  Smilde goes on to discuss the concept of ‘artistry’. “The concept of ‘artistry’ is critical in the world of musicians and entails a lot of tacit knowledge. Schön (1987) defines the concept of artistry as “the competence by which practitioners actually handle indeterminate zones of practice” (Smilde, 2009, p. 13). We could perhaps call early music an indeterminate zone of practice. Here we can see as a pedagogical tool, HIP enables explicit knowledge and collective tacit knowledge to enter into a cycle or process whereby they continually inform one another. In this sense, personal authenticity is actually fostered by the practice of HIP, as the musicians understanding evolves as does their ability to make choices about their own interpretation. Smilde quotes from a case study by Renshaw (2007) in which tacit forms of learning were utilized by music leaders:

Experienced music leaders are well aware that they have to create an environment that is conducive to fostering tacit forms of learning. Leading by example between people at all levels of experience, becomes critical in an effective learning process. Learning will then take place through watching, listening, imitating, responding, absorbing, reflecting and connecting with that particular musical context (…) It is clear that (this process) results in a strong form of knowing and understanding (Renshaw, 2007, p.36). (Smilde, 2009, p. 69).

If the practice of HIP is seen in this light, as fundamentally a pedagogical tool, vital in the education of young musicians, then many of the fears of its critics may begin to subside. If students are shown, as Inge suggested, after having established a certain degree of technical expertise, that research can lead to a deeper level of understanding, then the blind acceptance to the mastery of the work or interpretations of the composers intentions may have less of a strangle hold on the practice. As Henk Guittart states, “Musical intuition (“just follow your intuition”) in my opinion is actually musical intelligence, as in understanding and musical taste, both developed by listening to lots of music and teachers and doing lots of reading too” (Guittart, Artistic Credos on Being a Musician and Technical Thought on Playing a String Instrument, 2011, p. 2). This is made explicit in my conversation with Inge when she tells me that she very clearly hears the difference between performers who do research and those who do not:

IP: One pianist I know for example, I can clearly hear that he learned and read a lot, he studied Mozart cadenzas for example…

DO: So you can actually hear the difference in a performance whether or not they have studies historical sources?

IP: You can hear it a lot, absolutely, yes (Pasmans, 2014).

This demonstrates the importance of research and the effect it has on the overall performance. In the end as Bernard D. Sherman concludes in his article, ‘Authenticity in Musical Performance.’ “Some historicist performances might be remembered for musical excellence, unrelated to historical accuracy.... The most important legacy of the historical performance movement may be those performances that attain authenticity in the senses more often used in the arts: those of conviction, self-knowledge, spontaneity, and emotional honesty” (Sherman B. D., 1998).

The ‘Other’ Authenticity Revived

Peter explained to me that it is unlikely to hear musicians talking about authenticity any more. He tells me that “at that time it was used as a strategic concept really to make clear that we should look back and that we should understand the music from the perspective of where it comes from” (Peters, Consructing Authenticities, 2014). Inge also explained this to me, the way she understands it, HIP was a sort of reaction to the modern way of looking at music, reading exactly what is there as accurately as possible. As we have seen, the problem being, that it is not always there in early music, there are other things that are intended but not written, reading early music in a modern way results in musicians doing things to the score which weren’t meant for that way of reading. Inge tells me that in a way HIP was probably a backlash almost to the modern style.

Ultimately, in contrast to many of the sceptical views of the practice of HIP, rather than collapsing the gap between text and act, as Butt states relying on an a priori distinction between them, HIP can actually provoke a different way of understanding the relationship. HIP enables a type of understanding which is reinforced through the collective tacit knowledge gained in the process of musicking. As Peter Peters explained to me about the actual experience of performing:

PP: If it really works well, well it’s the same for any kind of music, then you all realise that now we are all part of the playing, and when that happens you can see that it is felt by the audience and you get this this mysterious back and forth that you as a performer with the audience, that you can feel that now…. something, happens… I’m not saying that it’s beyond our control, but it's more than just everyone playing his or her part, and it’s very nice when that happens

DO: And that’s ultimately probably the only thing you could actually call an authentic musical experience.

PP: Absolutely

DO: Because that feeling has been experienced throughout time…

PP: Absolutely, I totally agree with you… it’s that moment of here and now and you realise wow, this is really something, and in the end this is the only thing that we really want to realise, we don’t worry in any way at all about the sound being accurate, in the end it's all about creating a musical experience for us and for the audience (Peters, Consructing Authenticities, 2014).

The musical experience or event is what is crucial to the act of performing and also to the notion of authenticity. Authenticity has moved out of the limelight to a degree, scholars no longer feel obliged to put it in scare quotes whenever it is mentioned. Although critics like Kivy and Taruskin launched credible and convicing attacks on notions of authenticity within the practice of HIP, be it through questioning the reliability of historical information or the loss of personal authenticity in the name of histoical accuracy, the concept still remains pervasive. As Bruce Haynes states in The End of Early Music, “the idea that the word represents refuses to go away. The reason is clear: Authenticity is simple, it’s logical, and… it’s central and essential to the concept called HIP” (Haynes, 2007, p. 10). If the concept refuses to go away, is even perhaps a very part of the practice, then perhaps it is necessary to re-frame or review the common usage of it. As we have seen, from the perspective of performers, HIP is not seen as a strict set of rules through which one must read the text or perform the music, rather, HIP is more often seen as a pedagogy, it is a way of becoming a researcher and learning the different options and choices available to you within different contexts of performance. To draw a parallel once more with the church restoration, as Jones & Yarrow highlight “Distinct forms of specialist knowledge do not simply exist as different ‘perspectives’, but rather reside in the differing techniques at their disposal: a hammer and chisel literally offer different points of leverage to a pen and paper. Through conservation, the Cathedral, and its authenticity, are thus literally formed through the intersecting practices of heterogeneous actors (cf. Tait and While, 2009)” (Jones & Yarrow, 2013, p. 23). HIP, seen from this perspective is no longer tied to notions of authenticity as intentions or authenticity of sound but rather it is completely tied up with the ‘other’ authenticity. It promotes the inclusion of more actors in the act of musicking, from instruments to historical sources all of which enable a greater sense of understanding and therefore, as Taruskin might say, personal conviction. Henk Guittart told me “The word “authentic” has lost its original meaning to me. Authentic, as Gustav Leonhard told me in a conversation not too long ago, is “what convinces me today”. And I agree” (Guittart, 2014). In order to be convincing one needs to be convinced themselves and perform with conviction, in this study we have seen that performers feel that through research and the utilization of HIP as a particular research methodology, they are able to perform with such convicition.

Jones & Yarrow discuss understandings of authenticity in relation to the information they have available and making an informed selection, they claim that “evidence is combined with interpretation to produce a contextually specific resolution of a wider tension between material and aesthetic understandings of authenticity” (Jones & Yarrow, 2013, p. 17). In the context of musicking, the evidence is just a further element that contributes to the activity or event of doing music, it is combined with interpretation and framed in this light, can be seen as enabling a resolution, permitting even requiring the ‘other’ authenticity in the gap between text and act. In this way, in line with what Taruskin states, this allows authenticity to be about knowledge and personal relationships to that knowledge, ‘Authenticity...is knowing what you mean and whence comes that knowledge. And more than that, even, authenticity is knowing what you are, and acting in accordance with that knowledge’ (Taruskin, 1995, p. 67). If the traditional approach or paradigm of looking at practices such as HIP from the perspective of authenticity or historical accuracy are no longer valid as purported here, then this re-framing leads to the need for a new conceptual framework. The possibilities for which I will now explore.

Where do we go from here?

As has been evident throughout this investigation so far, research is a fundamental part of being a musician today. As Janneke Wesseling claims in See it Again, Say it Again: The Artist as Researcher, research has come to be a recognized buzzword on the art scene. She argues that people everywhere are talking and debating about the relationship between art and research, she states “These discussions often revolve around the legitimisation of research in art within an academic framework and it is primarily theoreticians, not the artists, who are driving them” (Wesseling, 2011, p. 2).  She goes on to state that “The exceptional thing about research in and through art is that practical action (the making) and theoretical reflection (the thinking) go hand in hand. The one cannot exist without the other, in the same way action and thought are inextricably linked in  artistic practice” (Wesseling, 2011, p. 2). This inextricability of action from thought could be seen as another example of a form of tacit knowledge. As we have discussed however, what leads one to understanding is both this tacit experience combined with historical understanding. It is therefore essential that in artistic research there is a realization for the necessity of historical inquiry and investigation. In The Sociology of Intellectual Life, British sociologist and STS scholar Steve Fuller states that “Historical consciousness is a precondition for critique… But to what extent has the curriculum of various academic disciplines cultivated historical consciousness?”  (Goodson 1999)” (Fuller, 2009, p. 29). Here is where artistic research must deviate from and not follow academic disciplines in order to cultivate understanding and thereby facilitate experimentation.

In his article ‘Epistemic Complexity and Experimental Systems in Music Performance’ Paulo de Assis, Senior Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute in  Ghentasserts that in his own conception of artistic research, Foucault's notions of archaeology and problematisaton are useful. He links these notions to those of epistemic complexity, where "what things are in the present is understood to be an accumulation of epistemic features throughout time, from the past until the present" (Assis, 2013, p. 160) and things, which allow one to "breakdown the epistemic complexity of musical works into its manifold constitutive elements (things)" (Assis, 2013, p. 160). This allows for new assemblages through a plethora of newly available possibilities, he explains that these open-ended possibilities allow for a more productive and experimental space of becoming, instead of a fixed, narrow sense of already being. Archaeology thus becomes useful as a methodological tool, in Foucault's conception, for exploring the "constellation of potentially infinite things" (Assis, 2013, p. 161). Archaeology for Foucault is about exploring, investigating and re-examining the past, not in order to understand the past better but in order to understand ourselves in the present. Assis finally combines these three important concepts with that of problematisation, explaining that "Foucault refers to the work one does to direct one's thought toward present practices which were once seen as stable but which the researcher shows to be problematic in some crucial sense" (Assis, 2013, p. 162). Assis claims that all four concepts resituate the discussion about things by examining their pasts, he suggests that the role of artistic research should be to "reverse the perspective from "looking into the past" to creatively designing the future of past musical works" (Assis, 2013, p. 162). By intertwining these concepts and utilizing them alongside notions of experimentation and creativity, Assis argues that artistic research should aim to bring together the past and the future of things through an exploratory process of assembling and reassembling potential possibilities.

Fuller suggests that in our age disciplines have become untenably tied up with the research frontier and from this perspective only the most pressing issues of today are ultimately considered important and only “token gestures are made to include bits of the discipline’s actual history, typically as concrete examples for abstract points” (Fuller, 2009, p. 28). This is demonstrable, he claims, through the fact that those who do pay attention to history quickly become considered historians of a discipline not historically informed practitioners. He explains that “A frequently overlooked implication of this point is that the selective appropriation of history for present-day purposes exists symbiotically with the attempt to re-enact the past in order to understand it on its own terms” (Fuller, 2009, p. 28). This results in the historical study of disciplines becoming autonomous fields of study outside the involvement of practitioners. As we have explored throughout this paper what is crucial is that practitioners engage with history, that they develop their own historical consciousness in an archaeological manner in order to understand their own practice. Whilst artistic research has become a new paradigm for practice, I have demonstrated the critical nature of historical understanding for musicians which, with further study could be applied my broadly across further disciplines. The elements of the scientific method, such as experimentation, that have been adopted by the arts, must engage with history in order to reach actual understanding. As Fuller states, “the experimental natural sciences come to be valued above all other disciplines for the ability to ‘lead from the front’ pedagogically, that is, to have their curriculum driven by the research frontier” (Fuller, 2009, p. 32). The arts, including artistic education such as conservatoriums and art schools, must engage with the field of science and technology studies (STS) and together they can begin to revaluate the common pedagogical approaches dominant in today’s knowledge institutions in order to reflect on their own practices. As Peter Peters states, “An STS approach entails ignoring the definitions, boundaries and differentiations that science itself uses to produce matters of fact” (Peters, 2013, p. 92). In this way STS and artistic research could begin to ‘lead from the front’ by developing new pedagogical approaches which would have applicability to both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences as well as to knowledge institutions such as Universities more generally and could thereby  ‘reverse the perspective from "looking into the past" to creatively designing the future’ of research practices.

Within the research paradigm that Fuller advocates, not one where teaching is thought of as an adjunct to the research orientated faculties that make up many knowledge institutions today, but one in which research is conducted on the basis of its teachability in order to disseminate knowledge, he states that there are two key stages. He uses the sociological concepts of demystification and detraditionalization (Beck et al., 1994). He explains how “One would begin by revealing the specific historical reasons that a particular research programme first arrived at a generally valued form of knowledge. That is demystification. Then, one would show that this knowledge can be assimilated and used by a variety of research programmes, often to ends quite different from that of the originator. That is detraditionalization” (Fuller, 2009, p. 33). This is an example of an approach that could be utilized as a means for experimentation within the process of artistic research.  Combining such a process with some of the concepts purported in this paper could enable a move towards a more practical, practice based pedagogy with an emphasis on historical consciousness as well as more tacit, experiential elements.

In an article entitled, ‘Tacit Beginnings Towards a Model of Scientific Thinking’, Rory Glass describes how:

Polanyi (1962) stressed that all knowledge is personal and without the person there is no understanding. There are a number of approaches to education which have been touted as successful by those who support them; inquiry learning, problem/project based learning, socioscientific issues (SSI), science technology and society (STS) framed instruction, and many others. A key to these approaches is that in each case, students are allowed to bring the full resources of their understandings to bear on the learning process. These also have a sharing component in practice, with students in groups discussing, describing and otherwise articulating their understanding (Glass, 2013, p. 2722).

If new pedagogical approaches are developed within the paradigm of artistic research, HIP can be understood as a research methodology, an archaeological necessity toward understanding one’s own practice. This finally allows for a fundamental shift from Kivy’s conception of HIP as a project of “archeologically restoring”  (Kivy, 1995, p. 283) to a more Foucauldian sense of archaeologically understanding. This understanding increases the capacity for experimentation through musicking and developing tacit knowledge through the experience of crafting personal authenticity. Experimentation is essential for artistic research to come into its own, to not only attempt to adopt parts of scientific methodology but to adapt and evolve. Seen from an STS perspective, this enables the removal of boundaries and clear demarcations and allows artistic research, including the practice of historically informed performance, to become more reflexive by problematizing its own practice.

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