Approach

The musicians at L’Armonia Boston perform both celebrated and lesser-known works of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. We examine them through the lens of Historically-Informed Performance, or H.I.P.

What is H.I.P.? Broadly speaking, it is the performance of music with consideration of the time and place in which it was created. This consideration is arrived at by inquiry: What did the composer hear in his or her performers’ playing that is particular to that period? What did their instruments, in their pre-20th century forms, sound like to him or her? How many musicians filled a stage (or a gracious drawing room) in these performances? Did any of this influence or inspire the composition? And how did it leave the first audiences? This allows us a closer feel for the world in which the composer and performer were active. We think that when we step into the composer’s world to partner in this way, we are able to approach the vitality and emotional content a work of music had to its first audiences. In other words, we aim to wed the composer’s intentions with our present-day experience and provide our listeners with as much truth and power in the music as we can.

Why H.I.P.? The word used to describe this endeavor about 70 years ago was “authentic.” Performances on “Authentic Instruments” and “Authentically Performed” recordings resonated with countercultural audiences. They were also heavily promoted by record producers who saw discs by these “hippies with tennis shoes,” as one of my teachers called them, fly off the shelf. Indeed, many of our most important H.I.P. artists and ensembles were discovered or formed by record companies. As distinguishing and lucrative as that word “Authentic” was, it suggested that anyone outside of the “early music movement” was inauthentic. Were Pablo Casals, Jascha Heifetz, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Vladimir Horowitz, and other giants of Western Art Music inauthentic artists? These folks and their fans were none too pleased with the insinuation. After all, you can only be “Authentic” you. Artists who have to offer insight and excellence, as these did, should rightfully be lauded. Eventually, “Authentic” was replaced by “Period Instruments.” Now “Historically-Informed” is in vogue, describing an approach to choice-making rather than a pseudo-political adherence to dogma.

(For more on the instruments we use, visit our Tools page)

Some may feel that exploring and, perhaps, emulating some of the performance practices of distant places centuries ago inhibits an artist’s own voice and authenticity. It is true that a musician ought not present a museum piece, offering only a view of what was once done. We must make living art, delivered of an internal artistic drive and a unique personality. But then, consider the transformative power of influence. Have you not had teachers whose personalities influenced aspects of your own? Has no one said something to you, even in passing, that inspired a journey, then or later, down an unexpected path? Art is not made in a vacuum. It is of humans for humans, and the exchange of beliefs and ideas is integral to it. An artistic personality is not immune to suggestion and influence; rather, it thrives on these. And if artistic consideration of things geographically or temporally distant was dangerous to artistic pursuit, neither Renaissance Flemish paintings of the Holy Land (that look like northern Europe), nor Shakespeare’s Richard III (political propaganda), nor Debussy’s works inspired by Javanese musicians would exist.

In many ways, what the great musicians of the 19th and early 20th century who influenced us not only aided the evolution of art but did much to preserve old music, too. This is ironic, since until the end of the 19th century relatively little old music was heard. Pre-recorded music was ephemeral in nature - you experienced it when it happened and then it was gone. That is, if you had access to organized and highly-trained musicians. Few people did. On those special occasions when you heard music, you mostly wanted something new, and composers obliged. Indeed, there were very few replayed “classics.” Audiences demanded the newest song, sonata, cantata, and symphony too frequently to create a performance tradition. Old music was revisited for pedagogical reasons, and when it was occasionally heard in concert it was clothed in the style of the times. Indeed, it was often updated by well-meaning and insightful musicians who felt that “updating” an 18th-century work for modern tastes was good for the composer, good for the audience, and good for them. They were being fully authentic 19th century artists, and their authenticity carried much of the old music that was received in the early 20th century.

The ratio of concert programming of music that was old (very little) and new (a lot) was flipped toward the 20th century, a change that went hand-in-hand with much new music becoming increasingly difficult for most audiences to understand and enjoy. Also, the autonomy most 18th and early-19th century composers afforded performers to be the final arbiters of good taste was replaced by listener and performer’s desire to adhere to the composer’s intentions. In a bygone world new music was demanded to such an extent that few works had the chance to become classics, a “canon,” revisited and reinterpreted. Our world is different. We have access to knowledge of the past that can enhance self-authenticity and invite the composer to share in the result. We feel that performing old music has immense value, and we see that when the composer is taken into consideration, works whose performance tradition has taken them through many changes in execution regain a clear sonic and emotional compass that may have been confused by the magnetic pull of the personalities of the many great artists that previously interpreted them and have influenced the way in which we received them. To us in the H.I.P. world, the resurrection of old instruments and practices, and the reemergence of sounds not heard since the time of their prevalence, is the result of a natural continuation of a shift that has been taking place for over a century.

The study of music of the 17th through 19th century with an eye toward the environment, practices, and instruments in which and for which it was created is right for our time. Historically-informed performance provides the opportunity to step into the shoes of inhabitants of essentially alien worlds and enlist their artistry in the formation and expression of our own. Far from stifling our creativity, H.I.P. enhances it with the excitement of discovery and the solemnity of dutiful service to the wishes of music’s creators. It provides a window into much of human history, which was devoid of most of the distractions of our time and replete with discomforts, difficulties, and suffering we cannot imagine. In that world, people had but music to relieve them of the physical, emotional, and social afflictions of their age. It is this power which musicians involved in historically-informed performance wish to experience and communicate to their listeners.

~ G.F.