The Historically Informed Performances (HIP) debate

[Bunny]

Bull. That comparison doesn't work at all. If you think about it, it's actually the exact other way around when it comes to music.

Norrington has some strange ideas, or let's say, he sometimes comes up with ideas that are more concept ideas and he has a tendency to get a little tunnel-visioned about his idées fixes (is that how you say it in plural)? But he does have a solid musical craftsmanship background, and some of the things he does are very well done, however "right" or "wrong" some of his ideas may be. What he does (and says!!!) usually should be taken with a few grains of salt, but I would definitely not go as far as calling him a fraud. That is unfair.

No, I usually spell it, "obsessions." 

However, if my French text book is correct,  it is idées fixés.

[Bunny]

Linguistically speaking, Shakespeare is written in modern English. But if one were to perform Shakespeare in a "HIP" manner, it might include such things as using boys for the female parts, speaking the verse in an Elizabethan accent (which supposedly is closest to the Appalachian accent of the American southeast today), and performing the plays in a re-construction of Shakespeare's theater such as is found in London's new Globe or the John Crawford Adams Playhouse at Hofstra University in New York. But some of these are external matters - although it adds a dimension of irony in a play like As You Like It for a boy to be playing a girl who pretends to be a boy who at one points playacts the part of a girl (as opposed to only having a female actor who plays a girl who pretends to be a boy who at one points playacts the part of a girl) - and I wonder how much they add to our appreciation of Shakespeare.

A more significantly HIP approach to Shakespeare would be more concerned with internals, such as (for example) Elizabethan attitudes towards ghosts, revenge, and regicide, the study of which has produced some valuable reinterpretations of Hamlet that have called into question older readings of the play as a story about procrastination or a "man who could not make up his mind," as we were informed in the Olivier movie of 1940. I'm thinking of books like Eleanor Prosser's "Hamlet and Revenge," whose conclusions seem to me unsatisfactory, and the most convincing HIP reading of the play I've encountered, Bernard Grebanier's "The Heart of Hamlet."

To bring this back to music, I'm wondering if a distinction can or should be made between external HIP (period instruments, hard timpani sticks, no vibrato) and more internal factors such as phrasing, ornamentation, and aspects of notation whose meaning has changed between ealier times and our own. But can a clear distinction between external and internal factors be made, and how do we decide what aspect of HIP falls into which camp?

Yes, that's the way I love to see Shakespeare!  Standing in the pit with the rest of the rowdy commoners.  However I was alluding to the tendency to take Shakespeare's language and to transform the slang into modern idiom so that the dialogue is understandable to modern listeners.  It's a sad fact, but most of the double entendres and jokes that Shakespeare included even in a tragedy go over most heads nowadays.

[Lilas Pastia]

No, I usually spell it, "obsessions." 

However, if my French text book is correct,  it is idées fixés.

No, M had it right. It's idée fixe, or idées fixes (plural). Fixe is an adjectif qualificatif (qualifyer??), not a verb in one of the past tenses - which would spell fixé, fixés, fixées. It would be translated better with fixated than fixed. In any case, idées fixées would have no meaning anyway. Gosh, the whole thing is so simple but so hard to explain in another language's grammatical system.   

Re, fraud, and the whole vibrato shebang. I like to throw a pebble in the pond when I've had a good glass of wine  . Don't make too much of it, I don't really care about Pomp and Circumstance anyway. It just seemed so contradictory when one knows that in those days interprets had a whale of a time, well, interpreting in all kinds of ways that would make today's musicians blush or gasp. Norrington's attempts at musical extreme makeovers have the seeds of polemic writ large (does that make sense ). As I said, I'm sure he has lots of fun ruffling feathers.

[M forever]

Have you actually heard any of his vibratoless recordings with modern orchestras, e.g. with the RSO Stuttgart?

[Lilas Pastia]

Have you actually heard any of his vibratoless recordings with modern orchestras, e.g. with the RSO Stuttgart?

Only the Elgar 1st and two movements from The Planets.

I forgot: the Fantastique too.

[M forever]

And?

[eyeresist]

(the suspense is killing me)

[Lilas Pastia]

(the suspense is killing me)

Boy, he must be dead by now 

And what? If you're asking if I liked them, the answer is yes and no.  The Elgar was almost a write off (the scherzo came out very well). In the Fantastique I noticed the winds and brass much more than the strings (quite fun and almost eye popping at times). In theory they should have been good in the Scène aux champs, but it came out on the dull side, slighty glacial and unromantic. When it comes to 'special effects', one only has to listen to the first minute of the finale in the second Karajan performance to hear something more characterful than in Norrington's rather plain reading: slimey low string glissandos, and a glacial, spine chilling one on the flutes 30 seconds later. And that's just the beginning.  Other than that, the Norrington is excellently played and recorded in superb sound.

Frankly, I wonder what's the idea of applying one feature of HIP (string vibrato) to a work like that one if the players/conductor are not steeped in the idiom. IMHO there's tons of HIPness and personality to the Fantastiques of Markevitch - Lamoureux, Monteux - Paris Conservatoire and the various Munches, whatever their provenance. It runs in the blood. I sometimes have the feeling that what runs in Norrrington's veins is beet juice. Not that I have anything against beets. I just bought some for this winter's preserves. But I have a hard time distinguishing his Elgar from his Berlioz or Beethoven. I don't know of a single conductor who excelled in all three.

[Superhorn]

    The   name  itself  is  rather  annoying, because  it  implies  that  those  who  don't  use  period  instruments   are  uninformed, which  is  not  necessarily  the  case.  The  term  is  so  self-congratulatory.
    While it  was  certainly  an  interesting  idea  in  theory  to  hear  what   the  music  of  the  past  might  have  sounded  like,  that's  just  what   we  get  with  HIP  performances.  What  the  music  MIGHT  have  sounded  like.
   Musicians  like  Gardiner,  Hogwood ,  Norrington  etc,  and  critics  such  as  Andrew  Porter  are  assuming  that  we  are  recreating  the  music  exactly  as  is  was done  in  the past,  despite  the  fact  that  a  time  machine  has  yet to  be  invented. Now  THAT  would  be  fascinating.  It  would  be  fantastic  to  hear  what  things  actually  sounded  like.
   Those  who  sing  the  praises  of  period  instruments  and   look  down  their  noses  at  modern   ones  are  blindly  accepting  certain  questionable  premises.  Among  them  are  the  assumption  that   old  instruments  or   replicas  thereof  still  sound  exactly  as  they  did  in  the  past  when  they  were  not  antiques,  and  that  they  are  being  played  exactly  as  they  were  long  ago.  Also,  that  the  music  is  being  interpreted  exactly  as  the  composers  would  have  liked.  These  are  questionable  or  at  least  iffish  assumptions.  And  that  by  reading  all  the  treatises  from  the  past  and  dutifully  following  all   the  latest  research  on  performance  practice,  you  get  Voila !  a  marvelous  performance.  If  only things  were  that  simple.
   The  interpretation  of  music  is  not  a  paint  by  numbers  thing. 
   There  are  countless   questions  and   no  easy  answers,  and  so  many  factors  and  imponderables  involved.
   As  the  eminent  American  musicologist  Richard  Taruskin  has  pointed  out,
"Instruments  don't  make  music,  people  do."
   Even  if  the period  instruments  still  sound  exactly  as  they  did  in  the  past,  how  do  we  know  that  the  way  the  music is  being  interpreted   exactly  as  the  composers  would  have  wanted?   After  all,  Bach, Handel, Rameau,  Vivaldi,  Haydn,  Mozart  and  Beethoven   have  been  dead  for  an  awfully  long  time.  But  people  like  Norrington,  Gardiner  and  Hogwood   are  in  effect  putting  words  in the  mouths  of  long  dead  composers.
    There  are  many,many  examples  of  composers  of  the  past  who  were  angry  and  upset  about  the  way   musicians  of  the  past  interpreted  their  music.  Sometimes  the  performances  were  just  badly  played  and  sometimes  the  composers  were  angry  about   the  way  they  felt  musicians  distorted  the  music  and   failed  to  do  justice  to  the  music.
   Mind  you,  those  musicians  were  using  the  authentic  instruments  of  the  day,  but  the  composers  were  not  interested  in  the  instruments   per  se,  but  in  the  performer's  interpretive  ideas  and  approach.   
  It's  the  same  today.  When  composers  such  as  Carter,  Adams,  Boulez,  Glass,  Rorem,  Corigliano  etc  hear  performances  of  their  music,  they   aren't  interested  in  the  instruments,  but  in  the  way   the  musicians  interpret  the  music.  And  they  don't  always  like  it.  Some  do  have  a  coterie  of  devoted  musicians  whose  performances  they  admire  greatly,  but  there  is  no  guarantee  of  their  satisfaction  with  other  performances.
   The  authentic  instruments  of  OUR  time  are  being used.
   That's  why  I  am  somewhat  skeptic  about   HIP  performances  today.
   I  have  enjoyed  SOME  of   them,  but  too  often  the  musicians  have  seemed  so  hellbent  in  getting  rid  of  stylistic "inauthenticity"  that  they  have  merely  thrown  the  baby  out  with  the  bathwater.

[M forever]

The above is just hollow blabla by someone who is obviously not at all informed about "historically informed" performance practice and what has happened in that area in the past decades. All these basic questions and points have been addressed literally decades ago, and that's not really what "HIP" is about in the first place. We are far beyond all that now.

"HIP" is not about recreating actual historical performances in the absence of recordings, it is about learning as much about the instruments, playing practices, esthetics, goals, challenges, and circumstances of past periods as possible in order to widen our understanding of the interpretive possibilities. It is about better understanding what the written text can mean since musical notation in those days was very basic as most musicians only played "contemporary" music anyway and didn't need a whole lot of information beyond the basics. "HIP" is about researching and approaching those cultural contexts in order to enable us to interprete the musical texts more flexibly and to give us a better understanding of the musical parameters within which the music of a given period was composed. "HIP" in its best form is basically about giving the performing musicians more information, more background, more context, allowing him to understand musical styles of the past better, ideally enabling him to create modern performances which reflect the music making of our time but also show perspective and awareness of the historical contexts.

All this nonsense like "we don't really know what the music sounded like and sometimes the composers were unhappy and sometimes they still are today" is completely besides the point and, as I said, all that has been addressed and discussed ad nauseam for decades now.

On the other hand, even though, as readers of this forum know, I am highly critical of a lot of what happens under the "HIP" label, we have learnt a lot, have gained a lot of fascinating insights into the music of the past, and this movement has given us a lot of musically glorious performances of the masterworks of the past by a number of outstanding musicians. It has also given us a lot of pseudo-HIP crap, but that is just the nature of things in general.

Finally, and I know this may be hard to understand for Americans like "Superhorn", it is only natural and desireable that these things get researched and explored because they are a very important part of our cultural history, and of course some people want to find out and preserve as much about that history as possible, just like about many other areas and aspects of our cultural history.

[Superhorn]

    With  all  due  respect, Mforever,  your  comments  are  pure  sophistry  and  you  completely  missed  the  point  of  what  I  was  trying  to  say.
   And  by  the  way,  I  am  far  from  uninformed  about  HIP  and  have  read  and  pondered  a great  deal  about  it,  and  am  very  familiar  with  the  sound  of  old  instruments.
   You  say  that  HIP  is  about  "learning  as  much  as  possible  about  the  instruments, performance  practice, esthetics,goals, challenges, circusmstances of  past  periods  as   possible  in  order  to  widen  our  understanding  of  the  interpretive  possibilities."
    Well,  this  if  fine  as  far  as  it goes.  I'm  not   opposed  to  these  efforts  at  all. This  is  all  quite  admirable.
   I  was  never  opposed  to  the  use  of   period  instruments   per  se  and  doing  research  on  performance  practice.  What  angers  me  is  the  arrogance  and  smugness  of  so  many  HIP  musicians  and  musicologists  etc ,  and  the   insufferably  patronizing  way  in  which  so  many  of  them  belittle  and  dismiss  performances  on  modern  instruments  out  of  hand.
   Many  of  them  are  appallingly  lacking  in  humility  and  are  so  pleased  with  themselves   and  think  that  they,  and they  alone  know  how  the  music  of  the past  should  be  performed. 
    Many  have  said  that  it  is  presumptuous  to  assume  that  if  composers  of  the  past  could  come  back  and  hear  their  music   performed  on   modern  instruments ,  that  they  would  prefer  them   to  the  instruments  of  their  time.  Perhaps,  but  we  also  can't  be  sure  they  would  have  disliked  them  either. 
   I  think  that  if  Bach  could  come  back  today  and  examine  a   Steinway  piano,  he  would  be  fascinated  by  it  and  what it  can  do.
    Mozart  would  be  fascinated  to  see  a  modern  double  horn  that  can  play  all  the  notes  of  the  chromatic  scale  over  a  range  of  four  octaves.
   
   
   

[Superhorn]

    P.S.   Sorry  to  be  a  part  of  the  grammar  police,  but  it  should  be
"beside  the  point",  not  besides  the  point.

[Bulldog]

    I  was  never  opposed  to  the  use  of   period  instruments   per  se  and  doing  research  on  performance  practice.  What  angers  me  is  the  arrogance  and  smugness  of  so  many  HIP  musicians  and  musicologists  etc ,  and  the   insufferably  patronizing  way  in  which  so  many  of  them  belittle  and  dismiss  performances  on  modern  instruments  out  of  hand.
   Many  of  them  are  appallingly  lacking  in  humility  and  are  so  pleased  with  themselves   and  think  that  they,  and they  alone  know  how  the  music  of  the past  should  be  performed. 

The mindset you describe might have been common many years ago, but I haven't heard these refrains in recent history.  Besides (did I use it right?), the ravings of a few don't negate the value of historical perspective and knowledge.

[Marc]

The mindset you describe might have been common many years ago, but I haven't heard these refrains in recent history.  Besides (did I use it right?), the ravings of a few don't negate the value of historical perspective and knowledge.

Yes and no. But now the HIPPERS are mostly fighting against each other.
Bach's vocal works OVPP?
YES! We're dead sure!
NO! Dead sure we're not!

etc.

In general I sympathize with the HIP-revolution.
There might be a lot of arrogance in there, but what about the arrogance of non-HIP performers in the past, present and future? Lots of them are also convinced that the HIP-ers are wrong, and making fun of them. But it would not surprise me that this criticism is mainly caused by personal reasons. They have their personal insights and just don't want to change them, because they're afraid to lose their artistic freedom.

OK. So you want Bach to be your own Bach, because you're an intelligent artist who knows best and because it's your artistic freedom to change his 18th century music into your own 21st music?
Well, fine with me, but why criticize a performer who wants his Bach to be a different Bach, more historically informed, after investigating a lot of cultural-historical sources?

Many HIP-ers had to face arrogant and ignorant reactions from these so-called free thinking non-HIP artists. Like that HIP-conductor who wanted this modern orchestra to co-operate and discuss openly about the compositions they had to perform. I think the first violinist reacted with something like: "latest historical research has proven that this conductor is an utter idiot."
(I read this story I think in one of Lebrecht's books. If I remember it well the conductor was Hogwood. Hilarious? Yes, but also arrogant and insulting.)

I think there are as many arrogant HIPPERS as non-HIPPERS, and I agree with M forever, that non-HIP reactions like

- we do not know exactly what Bach or Händel really wanted; as if these HIPPERS have a personal hotline with them,
- we do not have recordings of the 17th and 18th century, so how can we be sure how it should sound?,
- we know that Bach and Händel were unhappy about performances in their own time, so why should we play their works 'historically right'?

are far beyond the point what HIP really means. I think those reactions are the real sophistry.

Maybe this is the difference?
HIP is: being interested in the historical and cultural context of a composition. (And hoping or sometimes claiming you're right.)
Non-HIP seems to be: being interested in personal development. (And thinking or claiming that's your right.)

Nothing wrong with both of them, IMHO, but I think they both deserve a critical view, without using hollow phrases. (Although I fear that I myself am a hollow phraser, too.)

[Bulldog]

In general I sympathize with the HIP-revolution.
There might be a lot of arrogance in there, but what about the arrogance of non-HIP performers in the past, present and future?

I recall an interview many years ago in Fanfare Magazine with Pinchas Zukerman who was having a fit about the HIP movement.  Essentially, he said that HIP performers only took that route because they were inferior musicians who would get no exposure if they played modern instruments.

Given Zukerman's obnoxious attitude, I pledged to myself never to acquire any disc of his.  Of course, that's very easy to do since Zukerman's tastes in music rarely coincide with mine.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

I recall an interview many years ago in Fanfare Magazine with Pinchas Zukerman who was having a fit about the HIP movement.  Essentially, he said that HIP performers only took that route because they were inferior musicians who would get no exposure if they played modern instruments.

Given Zukerman's obnoxious attitude, I pledged to myself never to acquire any disc of his.  Of course, that's very easy to do since Zukerman's tastes in music rarely coincide with mine.

I met Zukerman once, quite informally one day at an animal hospital where he'd brought his critically sick German Shepherd in to be tended to (I worked there).

Hard to believe he'd been toting such a large pet around while touring, but that's what he'd done. This was around 1990.

Anyway, at first I didn't recognize him, even though I had just seen him perform some Mozart chamber music a couple nights earlier. He had a totally dishevelled look from a workout he'd obviously just finished (jogging, my guess) and his appearance in a sweaty teeshirt and shorts didn't fit the image of the 'tuxedo-clad musician'.

Plus, not being native English-speaking he had incorrectly filled out his patient/owner information in his chart and it took me a minute to sort it all out (he'd put his name for his dog's name, or something).

But when I finally recognized him and commented on the excellent performance I'd seen of his he let out a mile-wile grin. He then jumped in feigned surprise and drew back on his heels as if he were being attacked by a swarm of groupies. IOW, cutting it up with me.

Jolly guy all around, and surprisingly somewhere in the neighborhood of 6'-8" or so! Truly hulking figure.

But, yes, I have that Fanfare issue where he slices and dices HIP but I just can't shake the image of Zukerman as "that sweaty guy laughing it up with an average joe" (me).

FWIW.

[M forever]

So what happened to the dog?

[Lilas Pastia]

    P.S.   Sorry  to  be  a  part  of  the  grammar  police,  but  it  should  be
"beside  the  point",  not  besides  the  point.

This is a tricky one. "Besides" is generally used alone, at the beginning of a sentence and is followed by a comma. It has the meaning of "on top of/in addition to that" .

"Beside" is always followed by a complement (is that the term in English?) and may indicate a location close to something/someone ("she put her purse beside her on the seat"), or it may have a more abstract sense (I'm beside myself with indignation").

Not so hard once you figure this out.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

So what happened to the dog?

He (she?) got better. Mended up nicely.

[M forever]

Good to hear. Are you an animal doctor? Like Doctor Doolittle?

    P.S.   Sorry  to  be  a  part  of  the  grammar  police,  but  it  should  be
"beside  the  point",  not  besides  the  point.

If you wish, we can continue this discussion in German - it is essential anyway that you know German anyway in order to understand the subject properly, otherwise you can't read a very significant part of the relevant literature and sources, and more importantly, place them in the right cultural and historical context. After all, the concept of rhetorics in German baroque music is directly linked to rhetoric patterns of speech and the style of speaking/writing people had in those days. That is very obvious - but only if you understand exactly what and how they wrote (both music and language, and how they interact). A lot of that, most of it, actually, is lost in translation just like a lot of musical parameters are lost when translated to completely different performance styles.