Notation, the concept of ‘the work’ and musicking
Taruskin highlights Leo Treitler’s observation that "the meaning of a text is not fixed within its boundaries but is ever contingent upon the interests and the circumstances of the community of readers or listeners" (Treitler in Taruskin, 1995, p. 32). It is not only an accurate rendition of the text or its interpretation then but an element of artistic creativity in bringing to life, another work of art, which is constituted by the contextual setting of both the readers and the listeners. This point, highlighting the importance of the work, infers a number of further important concepts, which appear time and again within discussions of HIP and authenticity. Taruskin highlights the Romantic concept of Werktreue, the sense of the timeless work, the artefact of musical masterpiece which alludes to another notion, which Kivy explicitly refers to as the ‘the cult of the composer’. Both of these ideals have their roots in the Romantic period and have continued to pervade Western music history. Many have explored these relations in great detail in order to explicate the historical development of the ‘work concept’ (Goehr, 1992, Treitler, 1982, Burstyn, 1997, Butt, 2004). What Burstyn and Goehr both highlight and which is succinctly summarized by Butt is that “we should not rely on an a priori separation of work and performance”. Goehr asserts that before the dawn of the ‘work concept’, which she dates to around 1800, performance is better understood in terms of event. If this concept is utilized within the practice of HIP, then it allows for the space between text and act to remain. If the text is perceived as an artefact to be enacted not rigidly obeyed, then the performer is able to mediate authenticity by perceiving of the music, the instruments and the setting, including the listeners, as different perspectives through which they can craft the event of the performance.
Antoinette Lohmann, a teacher of Baroque violin and viola and a self-professed fanatical researcher is an advocate of performing contemporary compositions for early instruments and supports the development of a historical performance movement in parts of the world where it has not yet been explored fully. I asked Antoinette to reflect on the purpose or aims that motivate HIP;
There are many things we don't know, and we will never be able to HEAR what they did, so it's just a guess. Something we can find out, if you combine instruments with written sources for instance, it is at times possible to understand the text from the instrument and vice versa. But still we'll never know what it sounded like. It's almost impossible to read and understand outside of our context, we have our own subtext, any period author had his own context as well, and we might either see a subtext that's not there, or it is there but we fail to see or understand it. I think it is basically a modern view on particular music, a view that we can understand nowadays, and if it's close to what was intended, if they at all knew what was intended, we are lucky (Lohmann, 2014).
In this passage it is quite clear that historical accuracy is not the priority. Antoinette highlights the potential for dialogue between the artefacts involved in the practice of HIP, the period instruments and the score itself, this reinforces the idea of the musical event or perhaps more precisely, Christopher Small’s notion of musicking. We can see this as evident throughout the museum, from Chilean musicians with their instruments to Glenn Gould and the recording studio, there is a constant back and forth between the individuals and the artefacts they are interacting with. Peter Peters asserted the importance of this notion also, “I think it is incredibly important to understand musicking in early music and that we have to try to forget all these romantic notions about the composition and the composer” (Peters, 2014). Small argues that music in an instrument of social construction and is a process not a product of playing a certain note or reading a score. In an article about the historical restoration of churches by Jones & Yarrow (2013), they suggest that authenticity can also be seen from this social perspective, arising in activity at the interface between people and things, they state “authenticity is neither a subjective, discursive construction nor a latent property of historic buildings and monuments waiting to be preserved. Rather, it is a distributed property that emerges through the interaction between people and things” (Jones & Yarrow, 2013, p. 25). As Antoinette suggested it is rarely about the end product or attempts to reconstruct something specific, it is equally about the conversation, the interactions between, among others, performers, composers, scores and instruments.
