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.

The experience of musicking

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, 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).

Image and sound: The Schütz-Monteverdi Consort for whom Peter Peters is the organist

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Musicking

Christopher Small (1998) advocates the idea that this perception of music as an abstract object is not helpful in establishing the meaning of music. He argues for a different approach and introduces the concept of musicking as a framework to understand musical experience: "To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing" (p. 9). Understanding music as an activity allows for a more inclusive analysis of the relationships involved in what Small has coined as the musicking process. As Small asserts, musical experience is not an individual matter, but a social one as it involves numerous relationships between various parties such as the audience, performers, the composer, roadies and everyone involved in the activity of musicking:

"The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance" (p. 13).

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