Interview with David Shemer - The Performance of Early Music - Part III

David Shemer: Frankly, I would hardly expect Taruskin to regard what I said as agreeing with him. In my opinion, the meeting point between the Stravinsky approach and the HIP aesthetics is as far removed from how “large symphony orchestras play Bach” as possible. By the way, “large symphony orchestras” hardly ever play Bach these days any more – not in the old, Stokowsky-like, megalomaniac manner, anyway – which definitely, and admittedly, as an HIP achievement (although some may define it rather as a bad influence…) The very concept of “large symphony orchestras” is a clear manifestation of that same dubious “artistic freedom” (or sloppiness, or total disregard of the composer’s sound world, or historical ignorance - or all of the above) that both Stravinsky and HIP are so strongly opposed to. We may not know what Bach orchestra sounded like – although we can now more about it than some musicians care to admit – but we surly know that it didn’t have all these endless rows of strings, numerous blasting brass and so on, and so forth. Stokowsky knew that his orchestra didn’t sound anything like Bach’s, and he couldn’t care less. HIP cares. This, however, doesn’t in the least turn it into a “spiritual movement”, as you suggested. The late Rosalyn Tureck claimed to have had some special, almost extra sensual, communication line with Bach. Is this what you would refer to as “spiritual”? Because, to my humble ears, what Ms Tureck did had as little to do with HIP as Stokowsky. HIP is dealing with evidence – sometimes solid, often less so – of how music was made. And the issues under scrutiny are no less “hardware” than they are “software”: the construction and material of instruments, tuning, pitch, the line-up of choirs and orchestras, the acoustic conditions of the performance of different kinds of music, the documented evidence on articulation, sound production, ornamentation, text relation to music in vocal works, choreography relation to music in dances…

 

The question whether this study is capable is of yielding some kind of absolute truth is as relevant as it is in any other study field. Is the historian’s reconstruction (and whatever understandings that may ensue from it) of, say, life in the Roman Empire an absolute truth? Would anyone in their right mind make this claim – or, indeed, claim that, were this reconstruction absolutely true to the original picture, we would have means to know it? Yet, nobody seems to mind! No science, be it social, cultural, or natural, may boast certainty of its conclusions – only different levels of probability.  Why, then, something that is not expected from any discipline should not only be expected from HIP, but made a precondition of its relevance and even its very existence?

 

 

David Shemer: You seem to have your mind set on confronting me with some of the best of modern musicologists! So – does HIP insist on trying to turn modern musical perception into something hopelessly outdated? And if the perception is intrinsically modern – which it is, of course! – why, indeed, bother with all these performance issues? Will they make a 300-years-old piece of music sound for us the same way as it sounded for a listener 300 years ago? The answer is pretty obvious: they will not. Nobody can change a simple fact that my birth year is what it is, that I went to a 20^th century school, that I use a car, and not a horse, as means of transportation, that much of the music I hear is not live, etc., etc. – ad infinitum. But isn’t it equally true for my perception of works of Monteverdi - and of Brunelleschi, Rembrandt, or Shakespeare? Would anyone even consider rewriting Shakespeare, repainting Rembrandt or reroofing the Florentine Duomo? The very thought of it sounds to us sacrilegious nowadays (even though the practice of rebuilding old, and perfectly functional, churches or castles in a more “up-to-date” style was common until quite recently). The point is that Rembrandt’s picture, or Shakespeare’s sonnet is a complete work of art, whereas Monteverdi’s madrigal or opera isn’t: no musical piece is complete until it is performed. In the “old” times, this would have been a common place: music was not written for posterity, it was primarily performed freshly from the composer’s pen – and, as often as not, by the composer himself, or with his participation. The differentiation, and even alienation, between the act of composing and that of performing would have sounded strange to the utmost to the musicians of these times. Not so today. As I mentioned before, we have lost this sense of musical piece as a symbiosis of various acts, and tend to regard them separately. Yet, we want to hear music written not only today, but 100, 200, 500 and even 1000 years ago. This is highly unusual, this is unprecedented in the human history, but this is a fact. Do we perceive music from the past through our modern ears? Of course: these are the only ears we can have. Same as we only have modern eyes for Rembrandt or Michelangelo. However, if our modern mind seems still to be stimulated by Bach’s harmony and counterpoint, why should we assume that it will be better stimulated by them through means that would certainly sound strange to Bach’s ears? Indeed, arguing against conclusive evidence of one-per-part performance of Bach’s choir works, by telling that our ears are used to the lush sonority of a large choir (or “spoiled” by it), doesn’t sound to me much different than arguing (and, luckily, hardly anyone does that) against Bach’s harmony as” bland” after all these rich Wagnerian chromaticisms, or Penderecki’s clusters! But the way Bach’s music is performed is not external to it any more than any of its components. In other words, playing Bach’s piece on an instrument he couldn’t have known, or with a line-up of voices the like of which he couldn’t have heard is not much different than playing his C major piece in c minor, or adding here and there some juicy dissonances that he had no chance of having used. 

 
Avior Byron: You mentioned that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performances in HIP as well as in the mainstream concerts. What are the factors that make a HIP performance a ‘good’ one?

 

David Shemer: Well, this is where HIP and mainstream concerts happily meet. I don’t think that there is a major difference in defining this or that performance as “good” or “bad”. The bottom line is, of course, whether the performance “does it” for the listener: whether it is vivid, interesting, moving. For me, though, a good HIP performance has a huge advantage over a good mainstream performance of a piece from the early repertoire: it speaks a language that I am familiar with - and have the chutzpa to think that the composer, too, would have a better chance to understand…