Conservatorium's and Music Schools - The Musician as a Researcher
From my conversations with the performers themselves, similarly to the Director's of the Orgelpark, I got a sense that HIP, for them, is not about reconstructing an authentic sound, it is about understanding, it is about 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 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, Jori 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, 2014). In a brief conversation with Jori 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.
As already indicated, 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).
