The Historical Mindset

Common sense tells us that a certain percentage of the period performance audience simply likes the different sounds they're hearing, though some are (also) responding to spirited (and technically excellent) performances, regardless of the media utilized.

But beyond that, is there a segment of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) fans looking for something else? Such as TRUTH? (I wanted the word "truth" to pulsate, in addition to the rainbow rendering, just to emphasize the irony, but blogspot has limits). There are intellectual difficulties (which we'll get into in later posts) in trying to arrive at "absolute truth" about music of the sufficiently-distant past. But right now I want to share an anecdote.

An aunt by marriage, let's call her N, and her daughter, both modern cellists, visited our house one day, and I gave them a little harpsichord demonstration. N asked, "Where did you get all those ornaments?" I delivered a brief stock spiel about (a) minor differences in 17th vs. 18th C. keyboard ornamentation, as well as regional variations, (b) how scores frequently omitted ornaments, but musicians of the time were expected to know standard ornaments and provide them appropriately, and (c) how the 18th C. French school went the other direction and expected their copious ornamentation to be played as written ... blah blah blah.

I concluded by offering to photocopy an extensive table of ornaments for N from an anthology of Howard Ferguson's. "No, that's all right," N demurred.

N did not have an historical mindset. This incuriosity is certainly not representative of all mainstream classical musicians (and I believe it is less and less typical, if only because historical practices are often needed for survival these days), but there are still the incurious among them. And N was (for she has since passed) a respected cello teacher, well trained in the mainstream tradition, and a member of a variety of symphony orchestras for most of her career.

Yet I could not begin to get her to drink the historical Kool-Aid. There's an old joke: The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't. I don't know if that's even funny, but I do know the world can be divided into those with the historical mindset, and those without.