On Mar 27, 2010, at 7:52 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > It was my understanding that HIP (Historically Informed Performance) came > about as a response to the older use of the idea of "authenticity." We > modern early-musickers gave up on the chimeric pursuit of "authentic" > performances when it was realized that there never was a consistent "olden" > style in use in any place or time.
Take it from a grizzled vetern: We should distinguish between words and concepts. The abandonment of "authenticity" was a change in wording, not necessarily a change in philosophy or approach. "Authenticity" (the word, not the concept) was abandoned because it was both contentious and vague. The dialogue in say, 1983 might have gone like this: Prominent mainstream conductor, taking a break from telling the tuba player how to play a Bach Cantata part: What? You mean to say what I'm doing is INauthentic?? INvalid? Are you EM upstarts judging how we should make music? Are you questioning centuries of musical evolution? EM Person: Noooo... of course not... When, of course, the EM person was doing all those things. "Authentic" really meant only "not clueless," a shorthand for "attempting to be as faithful to the music as Toscanini always claimed to be, but frequently wasn't because he wasn't interested in speaking the composer's language." It wasn't a particularly good word for that purpose, so it isn't missed. It was a convenient label to put on recordings so buyers would know they weren't getting the same old modern instrument performances. But it carried too much baggage. I remember prominent classical DJ dismissing it by saying "What's important is the authenticity in the performer's heart," which sounds nice, but means nothing because it changed the definition of the word in midstream. And of course, this was all peculiar to English-speaking folk. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
