I think what Bill may have wanted to say is that there is a whole other dimension in lute playing than HIP - all the while being enriched, of course, rather than constrained, by historically informed performance... Nobody would want to revive the past simply to rehash the same old stories, but the old stories provide a frame of reference. If that frame of reference is native to the lute, all the better. But HIP is a means to an end - not the end. The widely held illusion that we can really even approach the "sound" of old times seems to me similar to the illusion that convinced Vincenzo Galilei that he could know what Greek theater was really like. Out of that particular dream, modern opera was born. The current flavor of HIP is also doing wonderful new things. And it is not the first one: Ravel and Stravinski both wrote Baroque music - unmistakably theirs... As Baudelaire hinted, it is mankind's curse : "Aller au fond de l'inconnu pour trouver du nouveau" - to explore the unknown's bottomless pit in the remote hope of finding something new. The historically informed point of view on HIP is that it is a child of its time: Once HIP has exhausted its novelty, what will it become? In other words: now that HIP is part of the curriculum, it is finally time to start creating some music, that is both consciously of our times and truly native to our instrument. Irony of ironies, there is not a single lutenist of the period between 1500 and 1800 that we remember who was NOT also a composer. To be totally HIP, todays' performers must go one step beyond and create a new vocabulary: just as in Israel today, Biblical Hebrew turns out to be insufficient to cover a number of concepts very necessary to every-day life. In order to be a poet in the old language, you must still say something new. So, after the HIP, welcome the HOP: historically original performance - Well, we'll get there some day.... In the meantime, I am sure Bill had all this in mind and more - Alain
At 10:41 PM 7/7/2004, Howard Posner wrote: >bill killpatrick wrote: > > > i find the whole hip approach to early music to be something of a > > tyranny. if we were to apply it to other disciplines - like painting > > or opera, for example - then we wouldn't have verdi's shakespearian > > operas or anything much beyond cave drawings. > >You don't seem understand what historically informed performance is, which >might explain why it could be "applied" to painting. We don't, after all, >"perform" Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes (though a person's attitude >toward the importance of experiencing Michelangelo's original conception >might affect his position on restoration, or whether it would improve on >Michelangelo to view the whole thing on video screens or postage stamps or >bubble gum cards). Of course, operas are performed in historically informed >ways all the time, with gratifying effects on the bank accounts of lutenists >and theorbo builders. > >Taking a historically informed approach to Verdi's Falstaff means trying to >understand what sort of sounds and effects Verdi expected from the >performing forces at his disposal and assuming that the closer a performance >comes to them, the better it will be; i.e., that Verdi knew best how it >should sound. If you begin by assuming that Verdi and Boito were committing >a sin in tampering with Shakespeare, you won't perform the opera at all, and >the question of whether to perform it in a historically informed manner >won't come up. > >HIP is not a dogmatic system of condemning anything anachronistic >(anachronism is as pervasive as continuo in baroque opera) or historically >impure, but rather an assumption that a) an old work worth performing is >worth performing well, and 2) performing it well entails understanding as >fully as possible the sound that the creators had in their ears when they >did the creating. > >Amazing. I just wasted 250 words justifying historically informed >performance to a bunch of lute players. > >Howard > >
