In May 2015, I had the chance to interview Johannes Boer, viola de gamba player and the current coordinator of the Early Music department at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. According to him, “research is so to speak what defines Early Music” (Boer 2014, p.1). Thus, during our conversation, I inquired about the research processes that inform his current practice, in the hope of gaining a better understanding of what, for him, constitutes the culture of early music today. In his answer, he made a clear distinction in what he considers an explicit and an implicit dimension in the contemporary practice of early music:
You can read but the moment you start doing, you discover that there is an actor thing to it; that you cannot find out other than by doing (…) Because we have this explicit knowledge which is the basis of early music as a movement, such as treatises... they give you indications how to play things (…) And then there is the other side of the performance: the practitioner, which of course was in those days the main thing. You were just doing things. And very little of these actions were written down. So it was the implicit or tacit knowledge, which was mostly guiding musical life in those days. What I'm trying to do now is connecting our tacit knowledge to the tacit knowledge of 400 years ago (Johannes Boer, 2015).
Johannes Boer explained how he uses the concept of ‘dwelling in’ or trial and error (Polanyi 1967) to make sense of what happens today when music practitioners are confronted with so-to-speak incomplete scores, missing some articulation signs. He argues that it is by a process of playing, once and again the same piece, trying different options, changing it, that a performer will understand how to play it, as eventually he will find his own articulation signs, his own relation to it. He speaks of ‘surrendering’ to the work of art and ‘living in it’, by letting oneself be guided by the instrument:
The discovery of the instruments’ possibilities went along side with discovering contexts of their functioning. By thus ‘feeling’ oneself into the unknown the image was gradually completed. Knowledge obtained in this way is basically personal and so is its application. Somehow the described process has kinship with the creative processes in composition, because a great deal of imagination is required to put things in its place convincingly (Boer 2014, p.4).
Because my research seeks to explore the culture of early music by looking at the different ways its members understand it, what follows is a characterization of Johannes Boer’s professional practice. Historian of science John Pickstone (2001) characterizes different ‘ways of knowing’ the world, each one characteristic of, but not exclusive to, a particular historical period. One of them is what he calls ‘world readings’ or hermeneutics, which consists of understanding the world by attributing certain meaning to it and therefore interpreting it. At first, I was under the impression that this epistemic endeavor would
be closely related to a musician’s performance. However, Johannes Boer suggested a different underlying process:
Because everybody is unique, has its own unique experience, which is introducing something which was not there before... I wouldn't call it interpretation because it implies that there is a fixed shape in the first place, whereas it should be alive. The artificial thing is that we think that we can have a sort of stable image of the past... whereas it was as lively as it is now probably! (Johannes Boer, 2015).
By pointing at his understanding of the process-like nature of past practices of early music, Johannes Boer pointed at the liveliness of such practice through time, implying that there is no ‘right or wrong’ way of playing early music today, that is, within the boundaries of basic performance rules, because, after all, “A dissonant is a dissonant, because it has this specific frequency (…) Things like the overtones, spectrum... These things were known back then, and they were working with it” (Johannes Boer in an interview, 2015).
Music practitioners such as Johannes Boer appear to approach early music by means of a more experimental way of knowing, rather than interpretative. Pickstone (2001) refers to this type of knowing as experimentalism, which is originally characteristic of the natural sciences and which finds its beginnings in the nineteenth century. This way of knowing centers on a few elements that serve to deconstruct a certain area of study and consequently analyse its different objects as ‘compounds’ (p.239). The activity of focusing on one element of his performance, namely the tacit dimension, as a basis for research I argue, can be associated with ‘experimentalism’. To these ways of knowing the world correspond ‘ways of working’ in the world (Pickstone 2011). Experimentalism is strongly related to processes of re-describing, reclassifying or refining technical processes; and ultimately re-assembling the different re-worked elements in innovative reconstructions. Johannes Boer’s approach of dwelling into this tacit dimension, experimenting with it and consequently producing a personal (therefore new) way of performing a particular piece can be typified as this way of working. Here, the instrument can be seen both as “a musical instrument and as an experimental setting for acquiring knowledge” about early music performance (Bijsterveld & Peters 2010, p.118).
In my research, I argue that an innovative dimension permeates contemporary practices of early music. As illustrated, Johannes Boer’s particular way of researching early music creates an experimental setting of which modifications in his practice come out. His explicit acknowledgement of finding a personal connection to the piece suggests a dynamic of transformation occurring in the culture of early music, calling for a rethinking of its very definition, meaning and significance.
References
- Interview with Johannes Boer, May 7, 2015. Royal Conservatory, The Hague.
- 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.
- Do you want to read more on how research defines early music?
- Or about the differences between science and art?
- Or perhaps read about an example of an incomplete score?