Historical Performance
Historical performance has constructed its own kind of jail: “This is the way the old guys did it, so this is how we have to do it, too.” It leads us to the inevitable conclusion that old music in the classical tradition must never be touched or modified, unless of course it’s modified by the gurus of historical performance because they have a really good idea of how things sounded 200 years ago. Roger Norrington, one of the early proponents of historical performance said about Beethoven, “his tempi are very specific.” Specific to what? How he heard his music over 200 years ago? Before Beethoven went deaf, he used to give piano recitals. At these recitals, boys were stationed on each side of the keyboard to catch the candelabra which Beethoven would often knock off the piano because he was prone to bouts of swinging his arms wildly when the music arrived at a particularly exciting passage. Beethoven certainly does not fit the profile of a man who was bound to a specific tempo for any of his work. He was too wild and unpredictable.
Historical performance reminds me of the reenactments of cave men wandering around with dinosaurs (they didn’t), which are so popular on the History Channel.
Historical performance is profoundly presumptuous because we don’t in fact have a clear idea of how old music sounded. We have no audio reference. Historical performance is, ironically, a completely contemporary interpretation of the classical canon. It’s a new musical genre that has attracted a few generous donors. Historical performance is now a progenitor of “period instrument” orchestras which benefit a growing number of musicians who have become very skillful playing these newly designed “old” instruments. Good news for baroque oboists, viola da gamba players and natural trumpet and horn players!
Recording became widespread in the mid-1920s. Thus, the oldest music for which we have an audio reference is only about a hundred years old. Gershwin’s Concerto in F, premiered in 1925, sheds light on the subject of historical performance. In the original recording, Gershwin was the pianist and it is rumored that the legendary Bix Beiderbecke was the trumpeter for the famous trumpet solo in the second movement. A few things stand out for me. First, the tempi are faster than a modern audience is used to hearing. Second, the time feel, particularly in the second movement, is profoundly different from any modern interpretation. A modern interpretation is more indulgent with the tempi, and the jazz rhythms Gershwin alludes to are not understood in the same way as they were 95 years ago. The time feel and swing are very different. The first time I heard the original recording with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, with Gershwin at the piano and Bix Beiderbecke playing the trumpet solo, was eye opening. No symphony orchestra in the world today could come close to emulating the swing of the piece as it was played then. So thankfully they don’t even try.
Musicians of other traditions are unconstrained by classical music’s cultural baggage and therefore often have no problem wrangling the canon into new forms. The great jazz pianist Marcus Roberts does a modern jazz version of Gershwin’s concerto, with some added improvisation in a more contemporary vein. It’s quite interesting and it does not resemble or attempt to imitate in any way the original interpretation: Roberts and company essentially blew up Concerto in F. Hooray!
The public is not at all interested in the internecine purity spats raging in the academy. People just want to be entertained. If someone can successfully make a “classical music entertainment” of any kind, it will be copied and quickly spread throughout the world.
A few other jazz musicians have deconstructed and reimagined works from the classical canon. One who stands out is the wonderful Philadelphia jazz pianist Uri Caine who has recorded some very interesting deconstructions of composers from Bach to Mahler. I think deconstructing and reimagining the work of composers from the golden age of Western music is fertile territory for exploration. Some of Caine’s deconstructions work better than others but all are interesting. Here are a few links: Mahler, and Goldberg Variations.
There were many times sitting in the pit at the Metropolitan Opera when I would fantasize about combining an act from one bel canto Bellini or Donizetti opera with an act or scene from a different Bellini or Donizetti opera. A fresh operatic combination. Call it B&D. With all the suicides, threatened suicides, executions, false flag suicides, madness and despair, I think B&D is a perfectly descriptive title for this mashup. Cut these bel canto tapeworms into digestible bits. Since the plots of these operas are all very much the same—romantic melodramas on steroids—they make the perfect sci-fi mashup replete with divas time traveling into each other’s tragedies. Ninety minutes long. I would go see that for sure. It might be an awful fail or it could turn out to be a brilliant cross-genre conglomeration like HBO’s Westworld. There were often long stretches between entrances at the opera so I had time to think about stuff like this.
With regard to amplification, the same rigid thinking applies. If Mozart didn’t have amplification, why should we perform Mozart amplified? The answer is simple: because audiences of the world have become accustomed to hearing music through a sound system. As I write this in 2020, the technology to amplify music has reached a point where classical music could benefit tremendously from state of the art sound enhancement (see Appendix B).
In 1999, Nonesuch Records released a recording of composer Steve Reich’s works remixed by DJs from all over the world. Steve Reich approved the project so he was surely intrigued by the idea of remixes (I personally like the remixes better than the urtext originals!). Much other classical music is, due to its seniority, in the public domain and now requires no permission whatsoever to slice and dice any way a DJ or composer or kid with a laptop sees fit.
Our entire world is being disassembled and reassembled in ways no one can predict or control, and new experiences are coming like VR and AR and multi-sensory shows with scent and sound and video and vibration and a light mist on the audience when you go over the waterfall in the boat on a video. What is the role of pure music in modern media? Techno-heads, samplers, data collectors, assorted geeks and DJs stir the cauldron of music gumbo with a spoon the size of Cleveland.
Historical performance practice is a big red flag for those who still entertain the idea of saving classical music. When music becomes beholden to a purity test, completely ignoring the 2020 musical zeitgeist, its days of cultural relevance have drawn to a close.
In the future, the occasional happy combination of ingredients will become a more frequent occurrence as the world becomes more interconnected. The music the world bumps to is a living, fizzy, bubbling, ever-expanding cauldron. This musical universe is something we have never seen before.