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Radical Historical Performance?

By comparison with other musical genres or art forms, the modern Classical music world places a lot of obligations on its performers. Because of the historical primacy of written compositions over the experience of performances, classical musicians’ creativity often takes a back seat to that of composers. And there are many strong opinions around, when it comes to what performers should ‘properly’ be doing with scores.

Sometimes these claims are associated with evidence of past practice, an idea which has received explicit formulation through the Historically Informed Performance movement. Contemporary opinions about how pieces ought to go are held so strongly, at least in part, then, because of a conviction that they are based in historical fact, and so transcend the realms of aesthetic preference.

This sounds very persuasive and authoritative, but if you follow where ‘the evidence’ leads, you reach some strange, paradoxical, and difficult conclusions. For instance, any number of informed listeners have laid claim to understanding what is ‘Brahmsian’ pianism. How many of these statements are grounded in evidence? Not many, it’s fair to say. Similarly, to what extent are contemporary judgements of performances of Dvořák’s string quartets related to an appreciation of the Czech Quartet’s recordings?

Clearly nobody is insisting that we play in the same way today as they did in 1928. And nor should we, because that would be ridiculous and incoherent. And yet classical culture still fetishises the notion of evidence, to the extent that it is regularly invoked as a stick with which to beat performers when they play in unusual ways.

This doesn’t seem like an especially sensible position. It must be time, then, to develop a more productive way of thinking about classical music in general: one which we believe can be liberating and stimulating for performers and listeners alike.

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To look closely at how judgements are expressed in classical music is to spot the outsized role played by an intangible sense of ‘rightness’: the idea that this composer’s music just, well, ‘ought’ to go like this, because... Well, because. But why that sense of rightness, and not another? Rhetorically, it is not hard to see why evidence is such a useful thing to invoke: it provides a firmer basis for those proclamations. In reality, however, the historical truth is rarely as neat as one might like it to be. Early recordings have a particularly nasty habit of undermining such claims for rightness, rather than supporting them!

Where does this lead? If we know that a collection of notes on the page – say, those of Dvorak – sounded very different in the past, why not search, urgently, and passionately, for ways to remake them in the future? In its best moments, that is absolutely what the HIP movement has achieved. Modern performances are often wonderful; the point is that they would be wonderful whether they were ‘historical’ or not. And if you are familiar with very early recordings, you will know just how narrow our field of possibilities has become, by comparison.

The really productive consequence of evidence, then, is not to say that we ought to be sliding around, playing and singing Mahler as they did in 1890, but to be directed away from single answers, rules and regulations, and towards recognising musical experience as a changing, fragile thing, the meaning of which is about creativity, gesture, and risk, and not adherence and obedience. In short, we should all be asking ‘what could this be’, rather than ‘what should this be’.

In the Florian Ensemble we are searching for a way of playing together that synthesises our own naturalised responses to music with this basic recognition that people once played very, very differently. This is a long process, on which we are only just setting out. We do not claim to be playing ‘historically’ as such, because, as our experiments with the Czech Quartet emphasise, our ears are not their ears. It certainly makes an interesting point to play like that – and it is fascinatingly worthwhile to try, for lots of reasons. We have learnt a great deal from them. But it is infinitely more important to develop a truly communicative musicianship that speaks to our own time, and to avoid at all costs a naïve historical ventriloquism. To put it bluntly: many of the things early recorded performers did are very hard to reconcile with modern taste. We need to explore what that evidence is telling us about music, but to take a bluntly ideological position on recovering those styles would be to miss the point. What’s both exciting and necessary is to aim for a synthesis that makes music-making meaningful now.

To sum up, then, we can say two things with confidence: a) that what musicians do with scores has changed a vast amount; and b), that many beliefs about what composers wanted or expected are not always what they seem – indeed, they often have more to do with current norms than with historical truth. Many performers feel limited by such strong convictions about ‘composers’ intentions’, which are not necessarily imposed consciously, but which act viscerally on one’s sense of creativity. Insofar as early recordings help to show up the incoherence of some of those limits, we hope this work may contribute to helping classical performers arrive at a more psychologically healthy relationship with their art.

When you notice history or ‘stylishness’ being invoked as a way of criticising performers, remember that we have recordings of the Czech Quartet playing the music of their great friend Dvořák. Notice how this playing contrasts with what today’s musicians and listeners are taught to believe about composers’ expectations, with the strong, almost moralistic emphasis on adhering to music in writing, which so often trumps the need to create wonderfully unique, vulnerable experiences. If we simultaneously admit the existence of this evidence, but are also happy to prefer modern style, many of the intellectual structures that underpin the policing of classical music performance start to crumble under the weight of hypocrisy.

Modern performance is wonderful, and so are early recordings. The next step is to transform this perspective into the urgent search for a radical expansion of musical possibility and meaning. We hope you will join us on that journey!