Steve Schwartzreplies to Frank Fogliati:

>>As I said above HIP means historically informed performance.  It is a
>>principle that is applied to most music today, but with double-standards.
>>For example, Kodaly in 1915 wrote a magnificent sonata for solo cello (Opus
>>8).  When this is performed on a modern steel-strung cello, with stopped
>>harmonics, vibrato, long slurred bow strokes etc.  etc.  it is faithful to
>>the composer's score and accepted practices.  I am not aware of any non-HIP
>>recordings of this work.
>
>This is, as far as I'm concerned, a red herring.  It's ultimately not
>about the instruments or faithfulness, folks.  It's about the musical
>result.  I've got nothing for or against HIP in itself.  Some performances
>I like, others I don't.  I'd never say that Kodaly on a baroque cello
>was a priori wrong.  I'd have to hear it first, and then I'd have to be
>convinced that the poor result was due to the choice of instrument, rather
>than to the player.

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

Except that in 1915 it was common practice to string at least one string
with gut rather than steel in Hungary and Austria.

As for being historically correct - far from it!  We use much less vibrato,
portamento and other devices than were common at the time, and many, many
performances do not use the rubato patterns that were used by Hungarian
musicians of the time - clearly audible on recordings with Bela Bartok for
example - who was a close associate of Kodaly's.  One could also point out
flex or intonation patterns, where our current practice is generally
towards very "tight" intonation.

In otherwords, do not assume simply because a work is "modern" that the way
we play it "now" is correct.  1915 was much closer to the dark rich sound
world of another century.  It was both more romantic, and in many respects,
more modern, in that their modernity was hard won, and a new consciousness.
Being a modern then was what being digital is now - the newest of the new,
and an accomplishment.

Performance pratice has evolved even since Schostakovich's Cello Concerto
in the mid 1960's.  We also use far less of the neo-classically inspired
percusive approach which dominated the playing of modern, particularly
avant-garde, scores through the 1980's.

In Music, on cannot step into the same concert hall once, let alone twice.
An ear for the subtlies of change over time is essential for musicians to
make choices.

HIP isn't a red herring, it is an approach, and at the heart of this
approach is questioning one's biases and practices, and comparing them to
documentary sources.  Of course, much has been made of the performances
which rely on written sources, but, a conductor who goes back to recordings
to try and capture the tumult that a less uniform ensemble brought to
symphonic music - so that an audience can really feel the jolt from
Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra - is doing exactly the same thing.

In the early years of California wine growing, the products of the
vineyards of the Napa valley were regarded as lesser products to those
of France, even after two world wars devestated both land and people -
even after blights took much of the best root stock.  Gradually, over time,
California rose in people's estimation - but a second trend occured,
one that troubled the French even more than a competitor.  A different
aesthetic of wine tasting began to take hold.  One based on riper fruit,
bigger tastes, less acidity and more fruit overtones.  As the different
aesthetic took hold, practices changed, even in France.

It is not really a matter of better or worse, so much as striving for
a particular kind of taste.  Once scarcity was the rule of the day - and
the art was to make the best wine using all of the material at hand.  Hence
the techniques of old France - blending in particular, choice of the right
growths for a given year, a variety of techniques of aging - have given
way to sophisticated use of wind and water to even out the differences in
weather from year to year, a concentration on varietel wine making which
attempts to breed a consistent taste and ripeness.  The French monk of
1600 was faced with the challenge of taking widely variable material, and
crafting it into wine was his art.  The Californian enterpeneur of 2000 has
more control over his material, and that control constitutes his art.

Each era faces different challenges and desires, and develops different
techniques to meet them.

- - -

Roger Norrington speaks eloquently about placing at least as much faith in
the documentary sources, and using period techniques without preconception.
This may sound heretical - to place faith in writing rather than ones
"instinct" - but every musician who has sat down to wood shed over a work
in an unfamiliar style has done exactly the same thing - placing faith in
the composer's intentions, and believing that if what comes out sounds
wrong, it is because the musician, not the composer, is at fault.

I've written elsewhere why musical movements work or don't.  Ultimately,
they work because we can live them, because the human body can grow to
encompass them.  However, growth is not willy nilly, our attention and
concentration shapes that growth.  The assertion of Historically Informed
Performance is that the performance practices of the past are coherent and
cohesive, and worthy of our respect and attention.

In the early part of this century, the view of evolution in biology was
that we would find primitive precursor organisms, organisms less developed
than those found today.  Instead, time has taught us that organisms adapt
quickly, and that we find short bursts of instablity, with long periods of
creatures who are quite as developed for their time and place as we are to
ours.  This same view needs to hold for music to some extent.  Yes we have
many techniques that the past did not have, which give us greater range
in the string instruments, greater variety of sound from the piano.  But
I would stack a fair pile of gold marks on the proposition that a good
quality musician from Bach's time could out improvise most concert pianists
alive today, that Haydn was capable of extracting figured bass faster,
that a pianist in Beethoven's time was more attuned to the subtlties of
that grammar than all but the most skilled of musicians are today.

In otherwords - we grow, but we prune as well.  And, from time to time,
even when travelling by jet liner, it is good to glance backward at the
country from which one came.

Stirling Newberry
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