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.

Understanding the organ as a technological artefact

On May 3, 2014 I had the luck to experience a feeling that could provoke the envy of almost any curious and inquisitive musician in search for novel musical experiences. I was lucky enough to put my hands on a replica of a medieval organ and improvise in the Orgelpark, a concert venue located in the heart of Amsterdam. That improvisation was my first musical encounter not only with a replica of a medieval instrument but also with an organ. Before that occasion my knowledge about organs was very limited and I knew little about how to perform with an organ. Being an amateur self-taught pianist my only advantage compared to a person who has never played an organ was that the keyboard of a piano resembles that of an organ – although in that situation the keys of the medieval organ were considerably larger than those of my piano and the former had two keyboards producing different sounds whereas a piano has only one keyboard composed of a larger amount of octaves. I knew nothing about bellows, stops, pipes and most importantly about the music that should typically be played on a medieval organ from around 1480. So I played just whatever came to my head in that specific moment passing through contemporary genres like jazz and blues. When I started playing the initial notes of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody I expected that some expert organist would have shouted his head off at my sacrilegious act. Surprisingly, not only I was not able to see much embarrassment around me, but I could even hear a pianist accompanying my chords with the melody usually sung by Freddy Mercury on a grand piano located on the opposite side of the concert hall. Even Johan Luijmes, the artistic director of the Orgelpark did not blame me for having ruined the instrument but encouraged me to experiment with organs in the future.

This experience occurred during a break from one of the symposia that the Orgelpark is currently organizing to gather the opinions of expert organists, organ designers and builders in order to reflect on possible ways of building a new Baroque organ. More precisely, the dream of the project team of the Orgelpark is to accomplish a dual goal: on the one hand the new organ will be designed in a way that Baroque music - particularly that of Johann Sebastian Bach - can be played on it; on the other, the organ “should also make its sound accessible in an innovative way, thus giving composers the possibility to create new music” (Peters, 2014, p. 1). Both the surprising reactions to my improvisational experience and the dual goal of the Orgelpark mirror a common understanding of music as involving much more than aesthetic and perceptual pleasures. Indeed Hans Fidom, the director of the research centre of the Orgelpark, points out that the activities that are currently taking place in the Orgelpark like the construction of a new Baroque organ involve much more than the production of potentially beautiful notes. In order to explain his philosophical conception of music he often referred to the concept of musicking, originally developed by Christopher Small in 1998. With the creation of this new term, Small intends to criticize an old but still persistent musicological approach that focuses on musical analysis of written scores without taking the social contexts of their creation and reception into account. In contrast, he favors a new musicological approach that considers both the production and listening of music as situated activities, entirely dependent upon their context of use. His idea is that music should not be seen as an object but as a process. For this reason he suggests to substitute the noun ‘music’ with the verb to musick, indicating any human activity that relates to music performance that lasts in time and occurs within a certain space. In Small’s words:

“To musick 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 […]. Using the concept of musicking as a human encounter, we can ask the wider and more interesting question: What does it mean that this performance (of this work) takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants?” (Small, 1998, pp. 9 – 10 as quoted by Peters, 2014, p. 9)

The adoption of this concept allows two main considerations: the first is that it is possible to deal with questions regarding music and its functions also from disciplines that are not commonly included in musicological analyses; the second is that it becomes obvious that musical notes or scores cannot coincide with the totality of human activities associated with music and that the organ is not only to be conceived as a musical device that produces notes. Hans Fidom conceptualizes the organ not only as a musical instrument but also as a ‘musical time machine’. In his words:

“The organ is in my opinion a musical time machine. Anything you can say about organs immediately reflects developments in political or artistic kinds of histories. It’s not just about sounds, or just about arts: it’s in fact about life itself. The organ is a mirror, it’s always a mirror of anything in culture. So if you listen to a medieval organ like the one we have here in the Orgelpark you can imagine how these sounds penetrated the world around 1480, which is completely different from ours. So it gets us into contact with that and that’s why I call it ‘time machine’ or ‘time travelling machine’” (Interview with Hans Fidom).

Tackling the same issue, Peters (2009) explains how, as a result of several restorations these old instruments “can be considered as coral reefs, containing the material and artistic sediments of ages. They are vehicles of information about how the instruments were designed and built, how they were meant to sound, and how they were part of musical practices, both secular and religious” (p. 5). In another article, Peters (2014) refers to the organ as a technological artefact that can help reveal the intentions and believes of the different cultures that have played, built or restored it. Adopting these conceptions, we can conceptualize it as a “device that generates questions and answers” as well as the materialization of aesthetic as well as philosophical claims by the actors that are involved with it (Peters, 2014, p. 2; Bijsterveld & Peters, 2010). Similarly, I have adopted the same approach by analyzing how the project team Orgelpark is trying to materialize their claims about music. More precisely, since their aim is to build an organ that could reproduce Baroque music – particularly that of Bach – and to render it aesthetically interesting for contemporary musical practices, I have analyzed how they intend to materialize their claims of an ‘authentic Baroque sound’ and how they seek to render it innovative through the building of a new organ. This of course raises many philosophical questions like ‘what is an authentic sound?’, ‘is it possible to know exactly a sound from a past musical culture?’, ‘shall we accurately imitate certain aesthetic properties of sound qualities from the past or rather experiment with sounds in order to innovate the contemporary musical scene through tradition?’. Here I will attempt to report their answers to these questions as well as to locate them within the broader historical performance debate.

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