Prom 9 (20.7.12): Beethoven Cycle – Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2

[Ariosto]

The analogy with painting restoration has always struck me as one of the best arguments for 'historically informed' instruments.

You put it all very well, ferns, if I may say so

It is a very clever argument. I say that because there is another example which is exactly the same. And that is the restoration of antique instruments - such as Strads and many others etc. I believe that they should be restored using the same materials as originally used. However we must remember that in most cases they have already been modernised from the late 18C onwards. New kneck, longer fingerboards, longer and tougher bass bars and strengthening to take modern strings and higher pitches.

So I agree about paintings, and instruments, but this argument fails when it comes to performance in my opinion. Sound is something that we conjure out of the air, it is not something that has a recognisable existance from the past, it is not something that is solid and tangable, or can be seen or heard.

We can only have an idea from the early twentieth century on - as we have recordings of how people performed.

Then there is the possibility that the original composers might actually prefer the modern sound and performance practice! We can't possibly know.

[aeolium]

Indeed. (And he updated some of the harmonies too, in his Handel arrangements!) But my point is not that he wasn't flexible when it came to such questions, but that he never heard for example a valved horn, an instrument developed for a different kind of music and which involved (as is clear from numerous 19th century accounts) what were considered to be compromises as well as "improvements". It makes no sense at all to say he "would have preferred" valved horns or whatever, any more than it would make sense to say he "would have preferred" Wagnerian harmony to the tonality of his own time.

No, of course that doesn't make sense and I never said that. But the clarinets which Mozart incorporated into his Messiah arrangement would not have been known - in that form - to Handel who would have been familiar with the chalumeau, and I was using that as an illustration of Mozart's use in his performance of Handel's music of instruments not known to Handel. So the question is not, 'would Mozart have preferred some later instrument?', but 'what was his attitude towards the performance of music from the past?'. If his attitude was that modern instruments were appropriate, why should that attitude be condemned in later practitioners?

[jayne lee wilson]

"The trouble with period instruments is that we don't have period ears".
(Robert Simpson).

[Pegleg]

I'm sorry to "derail" the topic, but that affirmation always bothers me! It is a huge generalization! It insults scientists and offends science!

If some things are occasionally disproved in science, that doesn't invalidate science itself, and every other scientific fact! If anything, on the contrary, it strengthens the validity of science, since in a permanent quest for "truth", everything is always open to further investigation - nothing is "protected" from it! That is exactly its strength! The fact that every "truth" is under permanent scrutiny!

That just shows in fact how difficult is for a "scientific truth" to be accepted as "true", and how "true" many scientific discoveries really proved, since they still stand "true" after centuries or even millennia of close investigation!

Of course we, humans, cannot know and understand any truth as "absolute truth", thus any "truth" we discover, no matter how close to "absolute", may still need to be corrected. That, however, doesn't compromise the quest for truth that is fundamental to science! Without this quest, and without climbing on this pyramid of scientific truths, we'd still be down there in caves!

Apologies for being off-topic, but I thought I should repy to this.

Well I'm not quite sure how I managed to press your alarm button, but let's return to what you had said:

That's the great thing about music, compared to, let's say physics: there is not only one possible result, only one "truth", only one "beautiful"!

I understood this to mean you thought that there could be many valid or “true” interpretations of a given piece of music by a musician, compared to a physicist investigating nature which by inference there is not.

I still thinks this is a rather poor comparison to make. Galileo peering down his telescope does for the Earth-centric view of the solar system. Max Plank's work does for James Clerk Maxwell, and the genius of Isaac Newton's clock-work universe is done for by the brilliance of Albert Einstein's relativistic theories. In this sense, “truth” in physics is a moving target.

Let's say, for example, that musical scholarship about a given Baroque composer’s works informs historical performance practice and influences it's interpretation by modern musicians. It's not unreasonable to think that this could, and does, change if and when new research in undertaken. In what way is this different to the examples from the world of physics?

Then of course, as I already said, we can have competing theories in physics at any one time. So rather than multiple truths being a characteristic of music and its interpretation but not “physics” as you suggested, I would argue that they are more alike than you said.

Why you should think that me saying "what is true one day, is not the next", which of course was a figure of speech, was an insult to scientists and science I really don't know.

It's an accepted fact the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant and nothing can travel faster. Yet last September reports surfaced of scientists recording sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/us-science-light-idUSTRE78L4FH20110922

If , and of course it's a very very big if, this proved to be true then you could literally say physics had changed overnight. This is something you appear to accept yourself in your post above. Perhaps rather than saying my comments are insulting to scientists and science (although you started talking about physics specifically) judging by your own comments, you actually agree with me. What we differ over is the original comparison of "music and physics" that you made.

[Bryn]

"The trouble with period instruments is that we don't have period ears".
(Robert Simpson).

Ah, but our ears can be trained.

[heliocentric]

We have no idea

As I said, that simply isn't true; we have a pretty good idea. Oneof the things we have a pretty good idea about is that performance practice in previous times was much more varied and less standardised than it is now: early pianos, for example, sounded far more different from one another than say a modern Steinway does from a Bösendorfer, and it's safe to assume that phrasing, vibrato and so on would also vary from place to place according to different regional styles, as you could hear until recently in the way horns and clarinets would play with vibrato in eastern European orchestras whereas in the West they didn't. And you'll hear a similar divergence of playing styles among HIP musicians. But let's also bear in mind what HIP actually stands for: it doesn't stand for some kind of spurious reconstruction of past times, however meticulous the scholarship might be and however sensitively incorporated into practice. It's a contemporary way of playing, aimed at 21st century concert situations and audiences. It's concerned to aim towards what might have been the sound heard by the music's original audiences, preferring this to what certainly wasn't that sound. The more accurate parallel to draw is not with religious dogma, but more with the questing and questioning attitudes of science.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

As I see it, the HIPP movement can be over zealous, and therefore can seem to be dogmatic. More emotion goes into the arguments for and against it than emerges from thge music itself. It is not helped by those who "invent the truth" to justify the way they want to hear the music. Furthermore, they appear to be very powerful and influential. When did we last hear a baroque work on Radio 3 with string vibrato? Some would say its absence was a good thing, but many would not. Extremism is rarely a good thing.

[jayne lee wilson]

Ah, but our ears can be trained.

Yes, but we can't (yet) access a time machine...
Or forget what we've heard...

...my Simpson quote (msg 138) is more serious than it may appear, for of all the unknowables, and for all the careful research about Mozart's, Haydn's or Beethoven's orchestras and the spaces they performed in, it's quite impossible to hear their music as THEY might have; simply because WE have heard symphony orchestras of the 20th and 21st Centuries play their music. Always bear in mind the principle of relativity, which is to remember to include the observer in the picture, or in the analysis of the picture.

[Barbirollians]

Which may explain why for example I find the first movement of the Eroica as performed by Krivine and his band on YT as impossibly fast and skating over the surface of the music .

[jayne lee wilson]

Which may explain why for example I find the first movement of the Eroica as performed by Krivine and his band on YT as impossibly fast and skating over the surface of the music .

Hmm... just waiting for the Krivine CDs to arrive from Berlin after fhg's and Bryn's enthusiasms...
which I'm sure are TOTALLY trustworthy...

[Vile Consort]

I think there are people who love Krivine in this repertoir and people who dislike Krivine in this repertoir.

But people who say "we DO know how it sounded in Mozart/Beethoven/Schuberts time" are just living with a false belief. They cannot possibly know. They can only guess. We have no idea how they played, or phrased, or how they coloured the sound, with or without vibrato, before the advent of sound recording. Written accounts and places where the music was performed cannot tell us how it sounded.

They are like the religious people who have an absolute belief that God exists. No one can know either way!!

We can, however, know what it didn't sound like. It didn't sound like it was played on violins with steel strings, for example.

[ahinton]

Yes, but we can't (yet) access a time machine...
Or forget what we've heard...

...my Simpson quote (msg 138) is more serious than it may appear, for of all the unknowables, and for all the careful research about Mozart's, Haydn's or Beethoven's orchestras and the spaces they performed in, it's quite impossible to hear their music as THEY might have; simply because WE have heard symphony orchestras of the 20th and 21st Centuries play their music. Always bear in mind the principle of relativity, which is to remember to include the observer in the picture, or in the analysis of the picture.

There's been a lot of good sernse and rational observations in this thread but few if any as concise and to the point as your citation of Simpson on this subject. I also remember him expanding on this once by saying that no one today can listen to the music of Bach as his contemporaries did when it was new and fresh because we've heard Xenakis (and, by implication, of course, they hadn't); he also made the point about Beethoven's contemporaries listening to, say, one of the Op. 9 string trios for the first time when they were brand new works and hearing them again in the late 1820s for the umpteenth time but now alongside what would then have been his new quartets; attitudes of mind and rational and emotional responses are bound to change with time, just as had the demands that Beeethoven made of string players in the late 1820s changed from those of a quarter century or so earlier.

A modern Steinway or Bösendorfer have been cited above, but there are those who not only know and care about the differences between these instruments enough to have a personal preference for one or the other and, if some of those are piano composers, where does that leave current (and, by implication, future Historically Informed) Performance Practice in respect of the works that they write for the piano?

It might be an instructive and thought-provoking aside to consider the possible performance practice attitudes of some of those composers whose long lives enabled their careers to run for, say, more than 60 years; what, for example, did le Flem think about orchestral sound on completing his fourth symphony in 1974 and how might it have differed from his thoughts and experiences at the time that he'd embarked on his first in 1906? How did Sorabji's attitude to the piano change from the time of his first sonata for it in 1917 to his Passeggiata Arlecchinesca (based on themes by Busoni) in 1982? Or Elliott Carter's towards the piano in his 1928 Joyce setting My Love is in a Light Attire compared to what he'll feel about it in the work for piano and orchestra that he's promised to write for Barenboim's 70th birthday in a few months' time?

Back to Simpson, though; your time machine argument is a very valid one, although I'd go farther and suggest that, even if one could travel back in time and listen to the works of Monteverdi, Schütz, Mozart or Schumann as new ones and share the experience with their contemporaries, there would still be the problem that we'd carry our present-day experiences with us when embarking on that journey back in time, unless we could be given a reliably workable temporary amnesia injection before doing so - and, in any case, even if we could, we'd either not remember those experiences of past times when we came back to the present or we'd remember them but back once again in the context of the present.

One of the greatest problems that I have with certain of the more vociferously expressed attitudes about HIPP (rather than necessarily about all actual HIPP itself) are the implicit assumptions on the part of at least some of its more fervent and dogmatic advocates that "the composer is always right", "the composer never changes his/her mind" and the like (and, as one myself, I know better than some just how untrue these are!); were this a correct and viable attitude, what on earth would we think, for example, of Boulez, whose composition and recomposition of numerous works has sometimes extended over decades to the extent that it has now seemed almost to assumed the mantle of a fundamental weapon in his compositional armoury?

[salymap]

It seems to me that the answer is to allow all types of performance from HIPP to fully 'updated' ones.

I am certainly no expert but remember rehearsals where Beecham or Sargent would explain to the orchestra
that if old so-and so- were alive today he would have added trombones, not scored that passage thus,etc. Sacrilege or legitimate tinkering ??

And surely the composers of the past wanted as large an orchestra as they could muster for their new work.

[Barbirollians]

Hmm... just waiting for the Krivine CDs to arrive from Berlin after fhg's and Bryn's enthusiasms...
which I'm sure are TOTALLY trustworthy...

I am sorry that you doubt my trustworthiness ( perhaps on the basis that I intensely dislike the Spring Symphony - go and listen to his performance on YT yourself . It impresses me more as a sporting than an artistic event

[heliocentric]

It seems to me that the answer is to allow all types of performance from HIPP to fully 'updated' ones.

And the good news is: they are all allowed, and nobody gets hurt (though some people seem to get a bit offended!).

And surely the composers of the past wanted as large an orchestra as they could muster for their new work.

Why "surely"? (Brahms's favourite orchestra for example was the Meininger Hofkapelle which in his time numbered 40-odd players.)