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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2021
This article explores an emergent vanguard of the ‘historically informed performance’ (HIP) movement in the twenty-first century, focusing on new music written for, and performed on, historical instruments. Drawing on musicological and journalistic writing, as well as first-hand interviews with artists working in the scene, discussion is centred around the work of three key practitioners: the lutenist Jozef van Wissem, gambist Liam Byrne and baroque violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir. Finally, an attempt is made to situate the scene, both in relation to earlier revivalist practice and to broader cultural trends, drawing, in particular, on notions of ‘retromania’, post-internet and post-postmodernist practice.
1 Ronström, Owe, ‘Traditional Music, Heritage Music’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival, eds Bithell, Caroline and Hill, Juniper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 44Google Scholar.
2 Livingston, Tamara, ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory’, Ethnomusicology, 43, No. 1 (1999), pp. 66–85Google Scholar, here p. 77.
3 The term ‘post-HIP’ is used elsewhere by the conductor Andrew Manze. In the booklet text to his recording of the complete Brahms symphonies, he writes: ‘The present version might be described as post-h.i.p., in that many of the performance decisions have been taken with a background awareness of appropriate historical evidence and practice but the instruments used are conventional (i.e. ‘modern’ rather than ‘period’)’ (Andrew Manze, liner notes for Brahms: Symphonies, Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Manze (CPO, 777 720-2, 2012)).
4 Juniper Hill and Caroline Bithell, ‘An Introduction to Music Revival as Concept, Cultural Process, and Medium of Change’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival, pp. 28–29.
5 These interviews were completed as part of my radio show Future Renaissance, broadcast weekly on Resonance FM: http://benjamintassie.com/future-renaissance-on-resonance-fm (access date 21 May 2021). Naturally, this scene extends beyond the artists discussed here; other ‘post-HIP’ musicians include Mark Summers, Christoph Schiller, Stef Conner, Lucia Mense, Sarah Angliss and Rob Bentall.
6 Steve Dollar, ‘Jozef van Wissem Wants to Make the Lute “Sexy Again”, and Jim Jarmusch Is Helping Him’, Washington Post, 11 April 2014: www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jozef-van-wissem-wants-to-make-the-lute-sexy-again-and-jim-jarmusch-is-helping-him/2014/04/10/5b9734f2-be92-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html (accessed 16 December 2020).
7 Series Two, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 20 October 2020.
8 Butt, John, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Lowenthal, David, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 122Google Scholar.
10 Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, p. 127.
11 Van Wissem's approach is similar to what the American oboist and musicologist Bruce Haynes called ‘style-copying in composing’ (Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 209–10). However, the approaches have an important difference: van Wissem privileges a fidelity to context (what Haynes calls ‘chronocentrism’) that Haynes sees as unnecessary or inhibitive. Haynes instead calls for ‘newly composed Period music’ in which ‘the particular work is quite original, but the vessel in which it is contained – that is, both the genre and the style – is fixed and constant [in the baroque style]’ (Haynes, The End of Early Music, p. 210). This approach risks, I argue, what the anthropologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls ‘folkloric performance’: historical re-enactments in which ‘performances can become like artefacts. They freeze. They become canonical. They take forms that are alien, if not antithetical, to how they are produced and experienced in their local settings’ (Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 64).
12 Composed by Jacques Arcadelt (c.1507–1568), a fragment of the song (in French: ‘Vous savez que je vous aime et vous adore’) is depicted in Caravaggio's painting, The Lute Player (1596). Van Wissem was commissioned by the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, to perform the piece for an event celebrating the painting's restoration in 2018. A recording was released on Jozef van Wissem's album We Adore You, You Have No Name (Gent: Consouling Sounds, SOULCXIX, 2018).
13 Series Two, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 20 October 2020.
14 Georgina Born concisely summarises the values central to the Werktreue ideal that I allude to here: ‘the self-expression of the individual composer-genius… finished and “untouchable” [musical works]… the vesting of unprecedented authority in the score… [and] hierarchical relations between composer and interpreters’ (Georgina Born, ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’, Twentieth-Century Music, 2, No. 1 (2005), pp. 7–36, here p. 8). In prioritising his own interpretations above fidelity to the ‘work’, van Wissem is perhaps the corollary to Richard Taruskin's ‘crooked performer’ (in twentieth-century HIP), one who is driven by ‘highly specific, unclassifiable, personal and intensely subjective imaginings’ rather than slavish devotion to the historical (Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 317).
15 Dollar, ‘Jozef van Wissem Wants to Make the Lute “Sexy Again”, and Jim Jarmusch Is Helping Him’.
16 Series One, Episode Four, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 4 June 2020.
17 Series One, Episode Twelve, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 30 July 2020.
18 Dollar, ‘Jozef van Wissem Wants to Make the Lute “Sexy Again”, and Jim Jarmusch Is Helping Him’.
19 See, for example, Gregg Kowalsky and Jozef van Wissem, Movements in Marble and Stone (Amish Records, AMI 034 R/W, 2012).
20 Reynolds, Simon, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. 56Google Scholar.
21 Reynolds, Retromania, pp. x–xi.
22 Michael Waugh, ‘“Music that Actually Matters”? Post-internet Musicians, Retromania, and Authenticity in Online Popular Musical Milieux’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Anglia Ruskin University, 2015), p. 37.
23 Karen Archey and Robin Peckham's essay on ‘post-internet’ art (disseminated for free as a pdf) is foundational on the topic: Karen Archey and Robin Peckham, ‘Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION/DATA’ (Beijing: Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, 2014: http://post-inter.net (accessed 14 October 2020)). As well as noting aesthetic commonalities in art made ‘post-internet’, the essay foregrounds the centrality of the network both as tool for dissemination and as informing the construction of the artwork itself. In Retromania, Reynolds also notes the importance of the network, although more pessimistically: ‘digiculture's hallmark [is] rapid movement within a network of knowledge as opposed to [an] outward-bound drive’ (Reynolds, Retromania, p. 428).
24 Again, here, I am building on ideas in John Butt's Playing with History, in which he explores HIP's position in relation to both modernism and postmodernism. Briefly, Butt challenges Richard Taruskin's view that HIP is, in fact, an example of modernist practice. Instead, drawing on Georgina Born's notion of ‘populist postmodernism’, Butt argues that ‘Taruskin's modernist definition of HIP is misplaced. He may be quite correct in perceiving modernist elements, but these are reused and realigned in a way that is typical of the postmodernism that Born outlines’ (Butt, Playing with History, p. 129). Interestingly, van Wissem's approach could be said to reappropriate elements closer to modernism. In playing historical music in retrograde, for example, his technique nears the score and process focus of modernism; van Wissem notes, ‘when I started to think about new compositions for lute [I] made the decision to perform the classical lute repertoire backwards. From this mirror image writing followed the idea to compose in layered palindromes’ (Jozef van Wissem, ‘Fifteen Questions with Jozef van Wissem’, Fifteen Questions (no date): https://15questions.net/interview/fifteen-questions-jozef-van-wissem/page-1/ (accessed 16 December 2020)).
25 Here, and when I use the term elsewhere, I have in mind Butt's three, interrelated definitions of postmodernism: as ‘specific style or form of cultural production’ (usually associated with irony and the dismantling of cultural hierarchies), ‘cultural discourse and academic procedures’ and a ‘wider cultural phenomenon involving both lifestyle and economics’. Like Butt, my focus is the third of these definitions, ‘suggesting as it does a fundamental change in the global situation of which the other two categories are symptomatic’ (Butt, Playing with History, pp. 147–48).
26 Steven Shaviro, ‘Detention’ (17 July 2013): www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1149 (accessed 9 November 2020).
27 See, for example, Marianne Schuppe, Nosongs (Edition Wandelweiser Records, EWR 1802, 2018) and Slow Songs (Edition Wandelweiser Records, EWR 1509, 2015).
28 Briefly, the visual of the harpsichord's mechanism is captured and translated into an audio signal which is then diffused through the body of the instrument.
29 The harpsichord, reconfigured, becomes ‘a unique artefact which both contains the potential of a given musical utterance and physically renders it itself’ (Patricia Alessandrini, ‘Resisting Reproduction in the Digital Age: Notes on a Sonic Arts Practice’, Nutida Musik (20 December 2016): http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/19336, p. 5 (accessed 16 December 2020)).
30 Kurt Gottschalk, ‘Tristan Perich’, The Wire 297 (2008), p. 18.
31 Elsewhere, Charles Kronengold explores the unique power of the harpsichord as an object mediating plural meanings in the twentieth century: Charles Kronengold, ‘Harpsichords (and People) at the Limits of Mediation Theory’, Contemporary Music Review 37, Nos 5–6 (2018), pp. 575–605.
32 Slavoj Žižek explores this idea in his reading of a joke in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka: a character asking for ‘coffee without cream’ is told that the café has run out of cream; only having milk, he is instead offered ‘coffee without milk’. Žižek maintains, ‘what you don't get is part of the identity of what you do get. In what sense? Because if you bring this logic to its extreme you can also see how with a double negation… the result is not zero’ (Slavoj Žižek, Slavoj Žižek on Coffee: From His IQ2 Talk, YouTube, 5 July 2011: https://youtu.be/_WHdAKfcNnA (accessed 16 December 2020)).
33 The series was revived in 2017 for the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
34 Series One, Episode One, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 14 May 2020.
35 Small, Christopher, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, London: University Press of New England, 1998)Google Scholar.
36 ‘Inside Voices by Liam Byrne’, V&A (no date): www.vam.ac.uk/articles/inside-voices-by-liam-byrne (accessed 16 December 2020).
37 Series One, Episode One, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 14 May 2020.
38 www.hallasteinunn.com/ (accessed 16 December 2020).
39 Series One, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 25 June 2020.
40 Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir and Stefan Östersjö, ‘Participation and Creation: Towards an Ecological Understanding of Musical Creativity’, Online Journal of Philosophy 10 (2019), p. 377.
41 Here, again, Christopher Small's ideas in Musicking are pertinent: he notes that the concert hall gives rise to ‘a dissonance between the meanings – the relationships – that are generated by the works that are being performed and those that are generated by the performance events’ (Small, Musicking, p. 16).
42 Series One, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 25 June 2020.
43 I use ‘non-classical’ here to describe a practice rather than an aesthetic. ‘Non-classical’ practices involve the ‘transplantation of contemporary classical vocabularies and practices into what you could call the “listening situation” of indie rock, electronic, and dance music’ (Thom Andrewes and Dimitri Djuric, We Break Strings: The Alternative Classical Scene in London (London: Hackney Classical Press, 2014), p. 81). The London-based concert series Nonclassical is perhaps the most famous example of this approach (and my reason for using the term ‘non-classical’); others include Multi-Storey Orchestra, 840 Series, Classical Remix, Filthy Lucre, Bastard Assignments and the London Contemporary Music Festival. Writing on the topic includes Andrewes and Djuric, We Break Strings; Johan Idema, Present! Rethinking Live Classical Music (Rotterdam: Music Centre Netherlands, 2012); and Chris Haferkorn and Julia Dromey, eds, The Classical Music Industry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
44 Andrewes and Djuric, We Break Strings, p. 51.
45 Andrewes and Djuric, We Break Strings, p. 54.
46 Archey and Peckham, ‘Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION/DATA’, p. 9.
47 Of course, it can be argued that historical instruments were not always ‘institutionalised’. Bruce Haynes, for example, notes that conservatoires seemed to him ‘a profoundly dubious place to study Rhetorical [Early] music… Institutionalising HIP in the twentieth century has influenced us all into thinking of it as a department of classical music rather than a bloc with distinctly different principles’ (Haynes, The End of Early Music, p. 76).
48 Series One, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 25 June 2020.
49 Bruce Haynes wrote, ‘we defined our movement in opposition to the classical establishment’ (Haynes, The End of Early Music, p. 41).
50 Series One, Episode Four, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 4 June 2020.
51 Series One, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 25 June 2020.
52 Series One, Episode Twelve, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 30 July 2020.
53 Alex Ross, ‘The L.A. Philharmonic Celebrates Iceland’, The New Yorker (24 April 2017): www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/the-la-philharmonic-celebrates-iceland (accessed 17 December 2020).
54 Series One, Episode Twelve, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 30 July 2020.
55 Nick Wilson discusses the importance of recordings as a catalyst for the ‘professionalisation’ of HIP from the early 1970s – for example, Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music's relationship with Decca's L'Oiseau-Lyre label, or The English Concert signing to CRD Records. Counter to ‘the perceived division between art and commerce’, Wilson recasts ‘some of Early Music's pioneers… in the guise of cultural entrepreneurs’ (Wilson, Nick, The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 11Google Scholar). Elsewhere, Bruce Haynes notes, ‘There was a time when “AUTHENTIC” sold records like “ORGANIC” sells tomatoes’ (Haynes, The End of Early Music, p. 10).
56 Series One, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 25 June 2020.
57 Series One, Episode Seven, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 25 June 2020.
58 Released in 2017, Dissonance slows the Mozart Dissonance Quartet to create new music based on a microscopic reading of its harmonic progression: Valgeir Sigurðsson, Dissonance (Reykjavík: Bedroom Community, HVALUR28, 2017).
59 Series One, Episode One, Future Renaissance, Resonance FM, 14 May 2020.
60 Steindór Grétar Jónsson, ‘Mozart in Slow-Mo: Valgeir Sigurðsson's “Dissonance”’, The Reykjavík Grapevine (4 April 2017): https://grapevine.is/icelandic-culture/music/2017/04/04/mozart-in-slow-mo-valgeir-sigurdssons-dissonance/ (accessed 17 December 2020).
61 Cutler, Chris, ‘Technology, Politics and Contemporary Music: Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms’, Popular Music, 4 (1984), p. 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 Jameson, Frederic, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text, 10, No. 9 (1984), pp. 178–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar9.
63 Nealon, Jeffrey, Post-Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
64 Nealon, Post-postmodernism, p. 21.
65 Prior, Nick, ‘Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern’, New Formations, 1, No. 66 (2014), pp. 81–99Google Scholar, here p. 95.