The practice of attempting to re-create early music performances originated in the first half of the nineteenth century, marking the beginning of what has been referred to as the ‘early-music revival’ (Sherman, 1997). By the 1960s, an ever-growing number of musicians, musicologists, instrument makers and other actors part of the movement methodically studied primary sources in the hope to recreate as accurately as possible the sounds of medieval, renaissance and baroque music (Sherman, 1997). Primary sources consisted of historical archives, iconographical evidence, literary sources, practical and theoretical treatises, philosophical texts and surviving instruments, which are said to “offer much tangible help in forging historically aware performances” (Lawson & Stowell, 1999, p. 18). In this search for accuracy in reproducing a past musical culture, particular attention was paid to a composer’s intentions, a composer’s performance practice and the actual sound of a given performance in the composer’s time (Kivy, 1995).
Key to this historical approach was the focus on ‘producing a good sound’, that is, the one produced by ‘original instruments’, whose materiality corresponded to information retrieved from primary sources (Boer, 2014). This tendency was influenced by the ‘polished’ sounds published in records at the time: “It all contributed to an exploding market of new instruments, editions of sheet music called Urtext, (expensive) facsimiles, reference books, specialized magazines, societies, concerts, festivals, broadcasting and finally as absolute winner the record industry” (Boer, 2014, p. 1). Additionally, a number of performers started to become specialized in what would result in the professionalization of such a practice. An instance of such a tendency was the opening of a department for baroque music in the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 1969 by the soon-to-be-director Jan van Viljmen (Boer, 2014).
In the 1980s however, such a revival became the object of a series of heated debates centered on notions of authenticity. Critics of the revived musical culture argued for the impossibility of accurately recreating past performances for mainly two reasons: first, access to historical evidence is always limited; and second, even if most material conditions were to be reproduced in contemporary performances, music would inevitably be perceived differently today than it would have been centuries ago. Richard Taruskin (1995) argued that “even at their best and most successful (…) historical reconstructionist performances are in no sense recreations of the past. They are quintessentially modern performances, modernist performances in fact, the product of an esthetic wholly of our own era, no less time-bound than the performance styles they would supplant” (p. 60). Similarly, Sherman (1997) pointed at the fact that “our musical aesthetics reflect our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual lives, which differ from those of past eras” (p. 9). As a performer himself, Taruskin did not wish to oppose the practice of historical performance; rather, he argued for a ‘de-mystification’ of original sounds produced by ‘authentic period instruments’: “The object is not to duplicate the sounds of the past (…) What we are aiming at, rather, is the startling shock of newness, of immediacy, the sense of rightness that occurs when after countless frustrating experiments we feel as though we have achieved the identification of performance style with the demands of music” (Taruskin, 1995, p. 79). Similarly, Lawson & Stowell (1995) point at “the revised operations in the minds of the players, reconstructing the musical object in the here and now” as the central tenet of authenticity in today’s practice of early music (p. 153).
By the 1990s, historical performance practice was “a recognized subdiscipline both in academic musicology and of conservatory curricula” (Taruskin, 1995, p. 51). However, questions of performance were still ongoing. This was linked to the frequent deficiency of notational signs in original scores, notably in regards to articulation and phrasing, making ambiguous the degree of expression considered adequate during a performance: “Those elements of style which a composer found it unnecessary to notate will always remain for us a foreign language, but eventually we may be able to converse freely within it as musicians, and so bring a greater range of expression to our interpretations, rather than merely pursuing some kind of unattainable ‘authenticity’ ” (Lawson & Stowell, 1999, p. 2). Before the eighteenth century, performance rules are thought to have been “dictated by the ear and designated by the players”; and such a tacit dimension is nowadays reflected on the relatively empty scores (Boer, 2014, p. 3). By the end of the eighteenth century, articulation signs became more frequent, but “their application was inconsistent and their meaning often ambiguous” (Lawson & Stowell, 1999, p. 47). Given the difficulties in knowing early playing styles, Sherman (1997) contends that “We must fill in the gaps with our imaginations, and we have twentieth-century imaginations” (p. 8). Boer (2014) even speaks of a “movement of expressive liberation” (p. 4) when it comes to contemporary early music performance. Today, the impact of such debates can be observed in practices of early music that indeed comprise a dimension that is not dictated by historical sources. Similar to Taruskin (1995), who “[feels] not only free but duty-bound to invent an approach” (p. 58) in his practice of early music, many others exhibit the same attitude. Moreover, if historical performance is mainly modern, then it becomes interesting to look at how such a modernity produces today retro-innovations (Bijsterveld & Peters, 2010).
References
- Bijsterveld, K., & Peters, P. F. (2010). Composing Claims on Musical Instrument Development: A Science and Technology Studies' Contribution. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 35(2), 106-121.
- Boer, J. (2014). Playing by the Rules: Creativity and Research in Historical Performance Practice. Paper presented at the From Output to Impact: The integration of artistic research results into musical training, Orpheus Instituut, Ghent.
- Kivy, P. (2002). On the historically informed performance. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 42(2), 128-144.
- Lawson, C., & Stowell, R. (1999). The Historical Performance of Music: an Introduction. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Sherman, B. D. (1997). Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Taruskin, R. (1995). Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.
