At least one member told me they would welcome a debate here on this subject, so I thought I would start a thread on it.

Historically-Informed Performance (HIP), in the sense of the study and application of historical performance practices such as are no longer otherwise in common usage, can be dated right back to at least the beginning of the nineteenth-century, with the efforts of Francois-Joseph Fétis, who organised concerts of historical music in period styles at Paris Conservatoire from 1832 and later at the Brussels Conservatoire of which he became head. Paradoxically, a century that epitomised ideals of progress was also a century obsessed by historicism. Fétis was very interested in old instruments and in Renaissance and Baroque music and organised performances. The mid-century saw the growth of collected editions of composer's work, most notably that of the Bach-Gesellschaft. Around the end of the century, Arnold Dolmetsch, a Frenchman who moved to Britain, was the next figure to really give the movement a boost, making a name for himself from restoring and building instruments, and organising many private concerts of older music upon them. His efforts attracted the attention of various modernist artists interested in archaism, including Morris, Shaw, Yeats, Pound and Joyce. His work was paralleled by that of Richard Terry, who concentrated on voices instead of instruments, and organised many performances of Renaissance music in his capacity as choir director of Westminister Cathedral. Similar things were organised at the hands of Louis Diémy and Charles Bordes in Paris. Soon new groups began to be formed in Germany (Deutsche Vereinigung für alte Musik, Belgium (Pro Musica Antiqua) and Switzerland (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) as well. Both Wanda Landowska and Violet Gordon Woodhouse also pioneered the revival of the harpischord (or rather, a modern equivalent with a metal frame). A new level of empirical scholarship was set by the pioneering work of Thurston Dart.

But it is in the post-1945 period that the movement really grew to occupy a more prominent position within musical life. Nicolaus Harnoncourt formed the Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953, who came to record many Bach works on period instruments, as well as resurrecting Monteverdi operas. In the Netherlands, the work of the Kuijken brothers, Franz Bruggen and Gustav Leonhardt, and later Ton Koopman paralleled this trend, whilst in Britain the pioneering figure was of course David Munrow, who taught amongst others Christopher Hogwood. From the late 1960s onwards, the movement really took off and started to establish a place within mainstream concert life. In this period, other than Harnoncourt, the movement was dominated by practitioners from Britain, Belgium, Holland and a certain number in America (major HIP groups did not really spring up in France and Italy until the 1980s, and the movement in general was slowing in gaining ground in Germany; to this day it remains a very small subset of music-making in much of Eastern Europe, as far as I know). Anyhow, it was in the 1970s that, especially in Britain, the varieties of approach to performance developed in the context of Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music began to be applied to the music of the Classical period; in the 1980s the movement moved on further into the 19th century. Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music, Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players, John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Ensemble and later the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, and others introduced a new approach to Haydn, Mozart and more controversially Beethoven, involving smaller orchestras (in particular with smaller string sections) playing on period instruments, with a vastly reduced amount of vibrato (sometimes practically eliminated), a concentration upon small-scale articulative units in distinction to the 'long line', which was more characteristic of post-late-romantic approaches, a lesser degree of tempo fluctuation, and so on. To some listeners, the results were brisk and 'light' rather than 'expressive' and emotionally involving. As those involved with the movement came to perform and record works of Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms and others (and more recently Tchaikovsky, Bruckner and Mahler), some of the same characteristics were displayed.

It was during the 1980s that a public debate on HIP arose. There had been some critical comments written by Adorno in the early 1950s in his essay 'Bach Defended against his Devotees', which to a certain extent anticipate some of the later objections to the movement - seeing in it tendencies towards objectivism, in the manner of the inter-war Neue Sachlichkeit and de-individualisation of the music concerned. Commentators including Lawrence Dreyfus, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and most eloquently Richard Taruskin started to survey the defining characteristics of the performances concerned, and question some of their claims to historical verisimilitude. Taruskin, in a series of articles from the early 1980s through to the mid-1990s, collected in his volume Text and Act, developed the most coherent and provocative arguments. He argued that the practitioners were highly selective in their use of historical evidence (ignoring, for example, all the evidence there was concerning improvisation and embellishment, or other forms of flexibility, in historical performances), just selecting that which accorded with their own a priori musical agenda, which was to render music essentially in the manner of the neo-classical Stravinsky - in this sense arguing that 'historical performance' was really 'modernist performance'. In his influential essay 'Resisting the Ninth', on Norrington's recording of Beethoven's Ninth, he suggested that the whole visionary and optimistic message of Beethoven's symphony was unpalatable to those who had lived through a century of gulags and genocide brought about by those who had promised utopian visions, and as such Norrington was reducing it to an essay in pure formalism. He also attacked the predominantly positivistic methodology employed in the study of historical performance and its limitations: arguing that the historical data available was often fragmentary in nature and the elevation of its status might give a false picture of the past, which Taruskin believed was ultimately unknowable, and in the fetish of the details (the 'letter' of the text) the performers became blind to the bigger picture (the 'spirit' of the music). At the same time, he welcomed some of the performances whilst disputing their claims to historicity. It is at least arguable that his interventions influenced the shift from the term 'authentic performance' to the milder 'historically-informed performance'.

Now some quite reasonably have pointed out that Taruskin's comments are more applicable to the British tendency than to the wider manifestations of the movement (and he himself makes some concessions in that respect, in the context of his comments on the work of Harnoncourt or Reinhard Goebel). Some people have observed that the early recordings of British period groups have much more in common with those of Marriner, Leppard and others than people realise, and as such some of the key attribues of what has been called 'historical performance' represent an essential continuation of national performing traditions - the same sorts of arguments have made about Dutch groups; a specifically 'British' or 'Dutch' flavour of performance have by this argument come to be seen as intrinsic to the whole movement, simply because so much work developed in those two countries. Also, the movement has changed since the early 1980s when Taruskin's ideas were set down, with a much greater emphasis upon improvisation and embellishment, a new interest in historical virtuosity (which was prefigured in the work of Goebel in the 1980s) and in general a somewhat more flexible approach to historical data. Some see this as emblematic of a wider pluralism in the movement, others as a dilution and a symptom of its having been to an extent co-opted by the mainstream.

Whatever, the movement has certainly made a striking impact upon Western music-making. I've just outlined a little of the history and the debate above, I'm interested in anyone's thoughts on its achievements or otherwise, on the methodologies thus employed in the process of preparing works for performance, on the aesthetics that are entailed therein, on the whole notions of 'history' that are involved, and so on.

Oh; hmm.  I will think on this more and reply properly later.  My one experience of historicity that I can recall is with the WTC; Czerny published I think an edition that was very popular at the time, with dynamic markings that he claimed he had gotten by listening intently to Beethoven's interpretations of those works.  Later, when much more of Bach's choral works had come to light, many of these dynamic markings have been proven "incorrect" or, at least, not in the style of Bach.

Oh, and trilling in Scarlatti.  Can't forget about dem trills.  I don't worry about it so much in Bach for some reason.  I imagine, from what I've read of Sorabji's, (combined with a bit of common sense) that the history of vocal ornamentation is even more precarious.  Most people feel that they've a perfectly good grasp of the baroque aesthetic nowadays, it seems.

Well what a fascinating read that was!
Also great to have such a detailed view of an insider's experience of it. My only connection with it is to have been on the receiving end of some thrilling performances. I imagine it is a fairly exciting day when a powerfully revealing document or manuscript turns up to fill in one or two of the blanks occupied by speculation.

One area in which I imagine such a discovery would be particularly thrilling is in the performance of renaissance compositions, which as a layman, I understand to be full of educated guesses rather than certainty, and from my place in the audience I would be fascinated to hear a performance knowing it was very close to it's original conception.

I have now started this book, but not enough to talk about it.  (Though there are bits I think I will have something to say about), only this talk of historically-informed performers getting their information from paintings and drawings of musicians reminds me of a particular period ensemble in the Netherlands who the  paintings of a one H. Bosch as a source for their performance style:



They caused quite a stir in musical circles, so I've heard it said.

And here is conclusive iconographic proof that Satan himself used Martin Luther's head as the bag of his bagpipes!



How about that, Professor Parrott!!!!!!!!!!

We obviously need to be replaced by period listeners.

At last! Beethoven as he heard it!

Meaning privileged individuals from the higher classes, for the most part? I don't think much has to change for that to be achieved.....