Richard Taruskin, musicologist, 1945-2022

[Madiel]

To make such a claim, and if it is to be credible, one must be among the elite of musicologists in the widest sense and even specialized in the baroque age. Maybe Taruskin was in some respects but Hurwitz hardly is. Therefore, it would be useful with practical examples if one is to convince non-musicologists. Who is it that is not sufficiently informed and what are the exact consequences for selected music examples? In the absence of this it's just an unsubstantiated claim.

What? One just has to read the relevant texts. They're not secret. See also: the Bible, which plenty of Christians have evidently not read large parts of despite its wide availability. I don't have to be an elite theologian to be aware of that (and exactly why I find it at least a plausible proposition that adherents to a position don't automatically inform themselves well about the basis of their position).

Honestly, you could spend an inordinate amount of time knocking over straw men for some reason... or you could have actually watched the video by now.

Or you could have actually listened to a bunch of HIP recordings and realised that they don't all sound the same. Because you keep talking as if they all must by definition be good. They're not, just as all "modern" performances are not identical to each other. By your own argument not all HIP recordings can possibly be made by elite musicologists, and yet now you're asserting that only elite musicologists credibly know the truth. Which really sucks for all the professional musicians who don't make the grade.

Hurwitz will happily give you examples of both great HIP performances and terrible ones. Including in the video I'm now getting sick of referencing. Link provided. Use it.

Though I'll give you one example of my own (which happens to be one of his as well): the Quatour Mosaiques and the London Haydn Quartet both play the Haydn string quartets on period instruments. But they sound nothing like each other at all. The tonal qualities are totally different. They can't BOTH have been talking to the same elite musicologists...

[Mandryka]

Yeah! Manfred Honeck confesses to this in the notes to his Beethoven Eroica. In the first movement climax that listeners then found so disturbing and dissonant, he adds a new dissonance of his own composition. The idea is to replicate the subjective listening experience of that first premiere, rather than the objective sound of it. I find that really fascinating.

Bjorn Schmelzer discusses a similar idea in his essay on the Machaut mass. I too think it's an interesting line of thought.

[Mandryka]

I think the HIP argument exists outside the vibrato thing too. Probably the best evidence of our own contemporary taste affecting the HIP movement is the extreme dynamic swings associated with it - the performers' willingness to swerve between very loud and very quiet, to make dissonances and contrasts more jarring, to highlight differences between sections of music.

Personally I like this! Of course, it has influenced my taste and the movement has been influenced by the tastes of people like me. But it is clearly also a rebellion against some of the artists prevalent in the 50s-60s (like Böhm and Giulini and Karajan) who emphasized steadiness, long line, whole work structure, or in Herbie's case orchestral homogeneity.

I know an older music critic and organist whose primary complaint about today's orchestras, string quartets, and organists is that they play too loud. 

I've never noticed this point you make about dynamics! I mean, I do know that sections tend to be more incisively articulated in modern performances  of baroque music, but I hadn't noticed that the practice (which may come from ideas about musical rhetoric in baroque aesthetics) extends beyond the baroque in either direction, and I hadn't noticed the articulation underlined by dynamics.

As far as dissonance goes, that's a harmonic thing obviously and so the only way to make the chords more jarring is to either play different notes (by microtones) or to make the voices in polyphony clash out of step slightly. Harnoncourt, when he was in an uncompromising frame of mind (which wasn't always) experimented with the latter. But his reasons are explicitly NOT HIP (He's explicit about it in The Musical Dialogue) His reasons were to do with wanting to catch the attention of his audience, wanting to make his music sound really important and exciting to hear to modern people just as it did to Baroque audiences. I don't know anyone else who seriously experimented with these ideas, apart from Rübsam recently in the lute harpsichord recordings.

As you can see, there's similar thinking in Harnoncourt and Schmelzer, and you say Honeck - thanks for raising the issues, which has helped me get some thoughts together.

[prémont]

What? One just has to read the relevant texts. They're not secret. See also: the Bible, which plenty of Christians have evidently not read large parts of despite its wide availability. I don't have to be an elite theologian to be aware of that (and exactly why I find it at least a plausible proposition that adherents to a position don't automatically inform themselves well about the basis of their position).

Honestly, you could spend an inordinate amount of time knocking over straw men for some reason... or you could have actually watched the video by now.

Or you could have actually listened to a bunch of HIP recordings and realised that they don't all sound the same. Because you keep talking as if they all must by definition be good. They're not, just as all "modern" performances are not identical to each other. By your own argument not all HIP recordings can possibly be made by elite musicologists, and yet now you're asserting that only elite musicologists credibly know the truth. Which really sucks for all the professional musicians who don't make the grade.

Hurwitz will happily give you examples of both great HIP performances and terrible ones. Including in the video I'm now getting sick of referencing. Link provided. Use it.

Though I'll give you one example of my own (which happens to be one of his as well): the Quatour Mosaiques and the London Haydn Quartet both play the Haydn string quartets on period instruments. But they sound nothing like each other at all. The tonal qualities are totally different. They can't BOTH have been talking to the same elite musicologists...

The discussion is from my point of view about the musician's degree of information, not about the artistic quality. Don't confuse these concepts. Whatever the musician is well-informed or not, he has (in the way they had in Bach's age) a large degree of artistic freedom (cf. no two performances are alike), and this freedom is the crucial point as to whether a performance is good or not. And a strict adherence to the known parts of baroque performance practice doesn't guarantee a memorable performance. My experience is even that both well-informed musicians and less well-informed musicians most often create worthwhile performances, however different they may be, except in the cases where the musician at will indulges in an irrelevant musical style (compare the recordings of Bach's cello suites made in romantic Russian style by the three cellists I mentioned above, Maisky, Rostropovich and Shafran).

[Madiel]

The discussion is from my point of view about the musician's degree of information, not about the artistic quality. Don't confuse these concepts. Whatever the musician is well-informed or not, he has (in the way they had in Bach's age) a large degree of artistic freedom (cf. no two performances are alike), and this freedom is the crucial point as to whether a performance is good or not. And a strict adherence to the known parts of baroque performance practice doesn't guarantee a memorable performance. My experience is even that both well-informed musicians and less well-informed musicians most often create worthwhile performances, however different they may be, except in the cases where the musician at will indulges in an irrelevant musical style (compare the recordings of Bach's cello suites made in romantic Russian style by the three cellists I mentioned above, Maisky, Rostropovich and Shafran).

Talk to the video.

Or maybe just not spend your time treating Taruskin as quaint. Which is how this started.

Goodnight.

[prémont]

Talk to the video.

Or maybe just not spend your time treating Taruskin as quaint. Which is how this started.

Goodnight.

The video isn't interactive I suppose. But since you insist I'm going to overcome my aversion to Hurwitz and see the video.

[Karl Henning]

Generally the more informed musicianship also the more authentic music, but information has got its limits and for the remaining part one has got to rely on more or less qualified guesswork. No one, neither Hurwitz nor a hard core HIP-ster can claim that their guesses possess any higher value of truth.

QFT

[prémont]

Hurwitz will happily give you examples of both great HIP performances and terrible ones. Including in the video I'm now getting sick of referencing. Link provided. Use it.

Having seen the video I'm a bit disappointed. In the beginning lots of words with essentially no more information than what you have written on the last two pages of this thread. And then he takes ten (in his opinion great performances - I agree about the ones I know) and talks a lot about them - but there are no sounding examples and no detailled argumentation. I had nourished the hope that he was going to talk about some terrible performances and tell why they are terrible. This would be more relevant to his topic and the discussion above.

[Karl Henning]

To make such a claim, and if it is to be credible, one must be among the elite of musicologists in the widest sense and even specialized in the baroque age. Maybe Taruskin was in some respects but Hurwitz hardly is. Therefore, it would be useful with practical examples if one is to convince non-musicologists. Who is it that is not sufficiently informed and what are the exact consequences for selected music examples? In the absence of this it's just an unsubstantiated claim.

I think that even those who enjoy Hurwitz would concede that his emphasis is on monetizing his opinions.

[prémont]

I think that even those who enjoy Hurwitz would concede that his emphasis is on monetizing his opinions.

Yes, despite how original he seems to be, he is certainly not alone in this respect.

[Mandryka]

That's the main thing that puzzles me about HIP. Maybe Bach wasn't all that happy at having his music played by a wheezy string quintet. I think there's evidence that he did want female singers to perform in his works but was stymied by church tradition. I don't see any particular virtue in imposing limitations that Bach himself may have hated.

He wasn't stymied by church tradition. He got Anna Magdalena to sing three arias in the Matthew Passion, and according to Parrott (Composer's Intentions?) it was not uncommon to use female singers to sing in church in Coethen.

What may well be the case though is that in some contexts he preferred a boy's voice -- because boys' voices tend to be more delicate and sweeter.

[Karl Henning]

He wasn't stymied by church tradition. He got Anna Magdalena to sing three arias in the Matthew Passion, and according to Parrott (Composer's Intentions?) it was not uncommon to use female singers to sing in church in Coethen.

What may well be the case though is that in some contexts he preferred a boy's voice -- because boys voices tend to be more delicate and sweeter.

Good points.

[DavidW]

I've never noticed this point you make about dynamics! I mean, I do know that sections tend to be more incisively articulated in modern performances  of baroque music, but I hadn't noticed that the practice (which may come from ideas about musical rhetoric in baroque aesthetics) extends beyond the baroque in either direction, and I hadn't noticed the articulation underlined by dynamics.

As far as dissonance goes, that's a harmonic thing obviously and so the only way to make the chords more jarring is to either play different notes (by microtones) or to make the voices in polyphony clash slightly. Harnoncourt, when he was in an uncompromising frame of mind (which wasn't always) experimented with the latter. But his reasons are explicitly NOT HIP (He's explicit about it in The Musical Dialogue) His reasons were to do with wanting to catch the attention of his audience, wanting to make his music sound really important and exciting to hear to modern people just as it did to Baroque audiences. I don't know anyone else who seriously experimented with these ideas, apart from Rübsam recently in the lute harpsichord recordings.

As you can see, there's similar thinking in Harnoncourt and Schmelzer, and you say Honeck - thanks for raising the issues, which has helped me get some thoughts together.

That was interesting what you said about Harnoncourt.  I've only heard Rubsam in some of the organ works, but he is an interesting and thoughtful performer.  I'll have to check out some of his work on the lute harpsichord.

[DavidW]

Even if you don't care for period style performances, you have to admit that these musicians have pioneered recording and performing a great deal of baroque era music previously unexplored.  That is I think especially important when so many modern orchestras stick to recording Mahler and Beethoven repeatedly and pianists stick to Bach and Beethoven.

[DizzyD]

He wasn't stymied by church tradition. He got Anna Magdalena to sing three arias in the Matthew Passion, and according to Parrott (Composer's Intentions?) it was not uncommon to use female singers to sing in church in Coethen.
...

Do you have any other references for that? Bach's main concern in Köthen was secular instrumental music.

[Mandryka]

Do you have any other references for that? Bach's main concern in Köthen was secular instrumental music.

Yes, it's in Parrott's  Composers Intentions? page 359. He cites stuff in support, a journal article. The point about boys' voices being perceived as more delicate is a bit cheeky of me - but there are references in Parrott's book to that being precisely what some people felt about some renditions of Purcell's music in the 17th century : they thought boys' voices were better than women's in some contexts because women's voices were too loud and theatrical.

I bought Partott's book a few years ago when an academic said to me in conversation that it was a good summary of the state of play on this subject - but I'm not a scholar myself and so really can't vouch for his accuracy.

[Florestan]

Yes, it's in Parrot's Composers Intentions? page 359. He cites stuff in support, a journal article. The point about boys' voices being perceived as more delicate is a bit cheeky of me - but there are references in Parrott's book to that being precisely what some people felt about some renditions of Purcell's music in the 17th century : they thought boys' voices were better than women's in some contexts because women's voices were too loud and theatrical.

Was there back then in Bach's time anything resembling a professional choir whose contractual, paid duty was for all its members to sing every Sunday in the church or else face penalties? Or was it rather a matter of "do what you can with whomever you can" and different Sundays had very variable choir geometry? I don't have the answer, I'm just asking.

[Mandryka]

Was there back then in Bach's time anything resembling a professional choir whose contractual, paid duty was for all its members to sing every Sunday in the church or else face penalties? Or was it rather a matter of "do what you can with whomever you can" and different Sundays had very variable choir geometry? I don't have the answer, I'm just asking.

I'm pretty sure the answer is yes and no, and here and there, and maybe and maybe not, but give me a bit of time and I will peruse the book. I remember for sure that there were such choirs earlier - Dufay and such like - but Bach is a bit late for me (or early, depending on how I'm feeling) so I haven't retained anything I may or may not have read.

[Florestan]

I'm pretty sure the answer is yes and no, and here and there, and maybe and maybe not, but give me a bit of time and I will peruse the book. I remember for sure that there were such choirs earlier - Dufay and such like - but Bach is a bit late for me (or early, depending on how I'm feeling) so I haven't retained anything I may or may not have read.

Take all the time you need, my friend.

[Mandryka]

By the way, a lot of Parrott discussion is about the singers in the music Bach wrote for Prince Leopold's funeral, and I've just seen that Parrott made a recording of it with women, I'll check it out some time hopefully. It looks interesting partly because it's all so speculative.


https://www.avie-records.com/releases/trauer-music-for-prince-leopold/