21 HISTORICALLY INFORMED PERFORMANCE

Kate Bowan

Western art music has long escaped the present and performed music of the past. This retrospec­tive tendency can be traced to the early 18th century and found expression at the turn of the 20th century as Early Music Revival.

HIP practitioners explore repertoires from antiquity to the late 19th century. Ranging from lost traditions demanding profound sonic reimaginings to the defamiliarizing of canonical rep­ertoire, HIP has produced a vast body of musical performance, recordings, and scholarship. Unlike mainstream performance, which understands itself as being part of an unbroken tradi­tion, HIP began with a focus on earlier repertoires unmoored from their interpretative traditions and has sought to historicize its approach through engagement with a range of sources. Nick Wilson notes that while the diverse movement has at its core “a deliberate attempt to recreate the sounds of an original performance for music of earlier times,” its methodological framework could sustain almost any music written up to the 20th century where a historically appropriate style of performance is reconstructed on the basis of surviving instruments, treatises, and other evidence (Wilson, 2014, p. 3). Shaped by 1960s counterculture, HIP has reached beyond classi­cal audiences with repertories that share similarities with some so-called world musics, leading some to characterize it as a musical “Other” (Shelemay, 2001, p.

Any performance of a historical notated musical work is inescapably an historical reenact­ment. Why then is HIP different? The answer lies in approach. Mainstream classical performance, epitomized by “modern symphony musicians” has understood itself as part of an “unbroken” tradition and has undergone gradual, often unconscious change (Haynes, 2007, p. 9). Some have

Historically informed performance argued that this approach reflects the notions of “classical” as being timeless or taken out of history; period performers have turned to historicism as a way to reinsert music into historical time (Haynes, 2007). It is this historicizing bent that draws HIP into contact with contemporary reenactment studies.

The relationship between the mainstream and HIP has been marked by suspicion, but the so-called “turf wars” (Sherman, 1997, p. 5) also reflect the breadth of HIP. The movement, as Joseph Kerman observed, “has always flourished within an atmosphere of multiple controversy” (Kerman et al., 1992, cited in Sherman, 1997, p. 4). Some of these issues are inherently complex and have therefore been subjected to debate. Chief among them is authenticity and its relation­ship to affect.

In recent years, some scholars (Agnew, 2007; McCalman and Pickering, 2010; Schwarz, 2010b; de Groot, 2011; Mikula, 2015), influenced by the memory boom and renewed inter­est in emotion and experience, have turned to reenactment to gauge how reenactment might work as a “genuinely new form of historical representation” (Agnew, 2007, p. 309) that offers an alternative mode to the “all-encompassing, authoritative historical mainstream” (de Groot, 2011, p.

Because of the requisite specialist knowledge, music is often missing from general historical and humanist discourse, but HIP offers much to those interested in how affect, embodiment, and experience can inform historical understanding as these are essential to period performance for both player and listener. While HIP practitioners may not often consider the relationship between their work and historical reenactment, HIP has produced insightful scholarship on issues such as authenticity, expression, historical understanding and its relationship to creative performance, and the relation between past and present. In many ways HIP stands as readymade. It has radically questioned mainstream practices and offers an alternative mode of performance that through the combination of imagination, creativity, and fine-grained historical research seeks to reveal the unknown and make new what we already know. In this way, it resonates with the reenactment scholar's search for alternative modes of history telling and recognition of embodied performance as providing a space for the conjectural.

Authenticity lies at the heart of HIP. This was apparent in work of the Early Music Revival pioneers Arnold Dolmetsch and Wanda Landowska (Figure 21.1). Dolmetsch's urge to recreate the past extended beyond musical content to costume and setting; and Landowska, a renowned harpsichordist, is remembered for her challenge to those less informed, “You play Bach your way and I'll play him his way” (quoted in Edidin, 1998, p. 1). If the former revealed a desire for reenactment that went beyond sound, the latter professed a belief that she could channel a dead composer. For Robert Donington in 1963 “the doctrine of historical authenticity” was still to match “our modern interpretation as closely as possible to what we know of the original interpretation” (cited in Walls, 2003, p. 2). For Wilson, five decades on, it remains the movement's “integral premise” (2014, p.

The 1980s and 1990s produced a battlefield of ideas. Donington's “doctrine” experienced a major challenge in publications such as Early Music’s special issue, “The Limits of Authenticity; A Discussion” (1984), and the edited collection, Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Kenyon, 1988). For many practitioners, the term became “taboo” (Sherman, 1997, p. 8) and the concept came to be seen as “highly problematic” (Walls, 2003, p. 1), characterized variously as “distracting and tiresome” (Dolata, 2004, p. 453) and even “hopeless” (Williams, 2002, p. 69).

Figure 21.1 The Dolmetsch family in costume outside Jesses, Haslemere, c.1919. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Dolmetsch family.

This response foreshadowed developments in historical reenactment. As Stephen Gapps reminds us, authenticity is reenactment’s “holy grail” (Gapps, 2010, p. 52), and reenactors who exhibit a dogmatic and obsessive concern with historical accuracy are denigrated as being authenticity fascists (p. 53) (authenticity; practices of authenticity). HIP’s position caused a rift with many mainstream performers, who remained unconvinced and felt “their own sense of per­sonal authenticity” under attack (Wilson, 2014, p. 14). As the movement gained ground, debates around authenticity attracted the attention of some powerful musicological minds; 1995 was a “watershed year” (Butt, 2002, p. 37). It saw the appearance of Richard Taruskin’s transformative set of essays on authenticity and historical performance, Text and Act and the philosopher Peter Kivy’s Authenticities.

Taruskin pointed to the presentist agendas underpinning the early music endeavor, noting that aesthetic decisions and performance style reflected prevailing modernist tastes despite the quest for historical accuracy. This assessment foreshadowed Anja Schwarz’s more recent work that explores how “presentist agendas... shape reenactments” (2010, p. 25). Taruskin’s assault on the ethos of the movement transformed the parameters of the debate. Many of the questions he raised during the 1990s continue to resonate today (Butt, 2002; Walls, 2003; Haynes, 2007; Wilson, 2014).

Although different in key respects, Kivy and Taruskin both lament what they perceive as the constraining effect of historical musicology on emotion. Spontaneity and imagination were sacrificed for historical rectitude (Butt, 2002, p. 24). Bernard Sherman is another who identifies an irreconcilable tension between scholarship and art (Sherman, 1997, p. 4). Notwithstanding the timeliness of Taruskin’s critique, for others it has since become tired and simplistic. For Tess Knighton, the “concept of authenticity as strict adherence to the letter as opposed to the freedom of interpretative creativity” is an “old chestnut” (1996, p. 548); likewise, Walls sees “the inherent contradiction” set up by performers between “scholarship and musical expressiveness as problematic” (2003, p. 146). Rather than restricting creativity, historical sources can,Walls sug­gests, “enrich our understanding of the music and stimulate the imagination” (p. 167). Despite the objections, early music is characterized by a relationship between practice and scholarship, and when trying to reproduce music for which there is no sounding record, historical docu­ments assume paramount importance. In a 2017 keynote address, Margaret Bent reminded her audience that “we can never have access to original sounds,” that “claims of‘authentic' recreation are unavoidably false,” and that the “only access” is from manuscripts which have lost “the rheto­ric of performance.” Thus, she issued a call for “closer collaboration and in some cases improved mutual respect, between scholars and performers.” Accepted unquestioningly in her assessment is that historical performance is for “the here and now” (Bent, 2017).

More recently, performers, acknowledging musical notation as an “incomplete record” (Walls, 2003, p. 10), have tried to free themselves from what they see as a kind of “text-fetishism” (Haynes, 2007, p. 3) in order to reengage with past performance practices that often have a dif­ferent relationship to the printed page and are dependent upon improvisatory practices. For one practitioner, the fascination lies in the not knowing: “the beauty and attraction of early music is that we don't ultimately know, despite all the notation... how it sounded. We have to recre­ate it” (Shelemay, 2001, p. 10). Reinvention moves into the realm of the imagination and, like reenactment, mobilizes the “conjectural” and “speculative.”

Lost sound worlds and broken traditions abound. The chasm that can quickly open between current taste and that of the not so distant past has been powerfully demonstrated in research on early recordings. These are evidence of an older performance tradition, which although considered unbroken, reveals constant, unconscious change so that the performance style of the early 20 th- century sounds “shockingly foreign” to our ears (Peres Da Costa, 2012, xxviii). These historical recordings can help fill the gap between notation and interpretation, revealing “unnotated prac­tices” (Walls, 2003, p. 76) and invoke the provocative concept of the “period ear” (Burstyn, 1997).

The moot question of whether modern audiences can hear like those before them raises the related question of whether they feel as older ones did. If affective history is, as Agnew (2007) suggests, a form of “historical representation that both takes affect as its object and attempts to elicit affect,” then reenactment's potential for “sensual and corporeal access to the past” (Schwarz, 2010, p. 33) provides a way of imagining how people felt (emotion). Reenactment's “two ‘reals,”' described by Pickering and McCalman as a “desire to learn from the literal recreation of the past, and, at the same time, a yearning to experience somatically and emotionally” come together in HIP (2010b, p. 6). How and why music moves human beings has been a concern since antiquity, and affect is central to Western art music. More generally, music and emotion is an expanding research field that crosses disciplines ranging from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to sociology and philosophy (Juslin and Sloboda, 2011).

The immediacy of the temporal art creates a sense of being there. The same is true for reen­actment with its focus on “performance, empathy and embodiment.” For John Brewer, this is inherently dangerous (Brewer, 2010). He warns of the perils of conflating the “sentimental and ‘naively somatic' with a ‘real' experience” (p. 79) and questions whether “feeling and somatic experience are in some sense timeless, an adjunct of human nature” (p. 81). Musicians have also questioned whether “an identical acoustical and visual event will produce an identical experi­ence” (Butt, 2002, pp. 195—196).

Ironically, while historians' and scholars' turn to reenactment was motivated by a desire to engage with feeling, the turn to historical restoration in music has had the opposite effect. Taruskin, however, showed that this was a response to contemporary taste, reminding us that emotional detachment was part of the modernist aesthetic. Arguably, the very sounds of period instruments have extended the emotional palette. For example, the reclamation of historical distance brought about by the performance on original instruments of Mozart's and Beethoven's orchestral music produces a different sound world with its own affective qualities, thereby de­familiarizing this canonical repertoire. Although the emotional responses elicited will not be historically accurate, these performances offer new affective experiences. For one performer, historical performance is “a journey” that can “open some door of perception that will allow a new feeling about something I've never had before” (Shelemay, 2001, p. 25), supporting the claim that “reenactments have a powerful and immediate impact on a visceral register and can reveal the past in a way that words cannot” (McCalman and Pickering, 2010, p. 13).

HIP has tended to distance itself from the heritage industry's more kitsch forms of reenact­ment (Knighton, 1996, p. 549), and the term reenactment is scarce in HIP literature. HIP is not only historical reconstruction but a creative art, and artistic performance should not be judged on the same criteria as historical scholarship (Butt, 2002, p. 14). It is also important to consider that visual aspects of reenactment do not travel through the sound waves of sound recordings and broadcasts (Haynes, 2007, p. 145). Nonetheless, two scholar-performers have recently con­textualized HIP with its focus on preservation and restoration within the heritage and “living history” movements (Butt, 2002; Wilson, 2014). Certainly, Raphael Samuels understood the per­formance of Early Music as one of an array of postwar “resurrectionary enthusiasms” (Samuels, 1994, p. 23). And, as we see in the case of Dolmetsch, there has often been an urge to engage more completely with the past. There are still musicians who demand that the wood for their instruments comes from the exact region as that of the original or eschew electric light for candles “in order to better understand the mentality of the Middle Ages” (Sherman, 1997, p. 18). Walls notes that learning about period-appropriate dress can illuminate aspects of musical tech­nique and interpretation (Walls, 2003, p. 10). For Butt, the “precise nature” of the “remarkable restoration project of instruments, old scores, performance practices” goes “well beyond the gen­eral conception of restoration projects in museums, art history classes, or the grounds of country estates” (cited in Wilson, 2014, p. 216). In recent performances, he has undertaken a more holistic approach to recreate first performances. One review notes that the “value of these recordings lies not in archaeological reenactment so much as undermining our tendency to think of these familiar pieces as stable and perfected” (Sherman, 2014). Butt's focus on the recreation of a single event rather than a practice brings the undertaking closer to historical reenactment.

HIP's decades-long debate comprises “a continuous, reflexive critique” that despite its acri­mony offers an alternative and potentially fruitful perspective that resonates with and extends reenactment studies. For nigh 20 years, it has been possible to claim that “in today's musical cli­mate historical performance in theory and practice has truly come to form part of mainstream musical life” (Lawson, 1999, p. 2). Not only has period style been adopted by mainstream play­ers, but the players themselves often cross over. Historical performance has found its place in the mainstream and so offers an example for the future of reenactment studies and related areas of research. Despite its widespread acceptance, the movement remains sufficiently capacious to allow “radical freedom from mainstream convention” (Dulak, 1995, cited in Sherman, 1997, p. 20), and the “fantasy of recreating a lost original” (Schulenberg, 2010, p. 177) continues to produce a rich and diverse body of music and scholarship.

Further reading

Butt, J., 2002; Haynes, B., 2007; Kenyon, N. (ed.), 1988; Kivy, P., 1995; Peres Da Costa, N., 2012; Sherman, B., 1997; Taruskin, R., 1995; Walls, P., 2003; Wilson, N., 2014.