I recently caught the interview between philosopher Rebecca Lowe and A Year of Bach's Evan Goldfine. In it, she shares her thoughts on historically informed performance practice, or HIPP, which Biberfan readers will no doubt know well.
Historical Listening
For one, she rejects HIPP on the grounds that we cannot recreate the historical listening experience. Lowe questions whether reproducing eighteenth-century instruments and techniques can recreate what Bach's contemporaries actually experienced. Modern listeners have entirely different musical reference points, expectations, and cultural experiences. She compares it to meticulously recreating a Tudor meal: someone accustomed to modern cuisine will inevitably experience that food differently from someone living 500 years ago.
This one makes me smile. It's true, I cannot recreate the past. I cannot recreate the conditions under which someone first heard Bach's concerto for harpsichord and two recorders, BWV 1057: the smells, the placement of audience and musicians, the climate, and, probably more germane, the exact tempi Bach and his circle would have taken.
Philosophers have mapped this ground before. In Authenticities (1995), Peter Kivy separated several kinds of authenticity: of the composer's intentions, of the sound, of the performing practice, and of the performer's own voice. Within sound, he distinguished producing the sounds a period audience heard from reproducing what it was like to hear them. Lowe's Tudor meal is an argument against the second. I'll grant it. It says nothing about the first.
What I do know is that hearing that same concerto on two modern flutes and a piano, with modern strings, is very much what an audience in Bach's Leipzig did not hear. Consider what changes. Bach calculated a balance of recorders against strings; metal flutes alter it. At A=415, the modern convention for baroque pitch and itself an approximation of the varied pitches Bach knew, gut strings sit at a different tension and color than at 440 or above. An unequal, well-tempered tuning gives F major a different character than equal temperament does. In the tuttis, the harpsichordist doesn't simply rest or double the bass but realizes the continuo, filling in harmony from the figures. And a baroque bow, lighter and shaped toward articulation and swell rather than an unbroken sustained line, makes certain bowings natural that a modern bow has to work to imitate. None of this recreates the 1730s. All of it changes what we hear.
The supposition that we should abandon any attempt to approach the past because it cannot be fully recreated is something I won't accept. No two performances are identical anyway. Musical performance has variables that shift from concert to concert, week to week, year to year, and, by extension, century to century. Bruce Haynes traced this in The End of Early Music: mainstream performance style never stood still. Each generation inherited its sense of how Bach "goes" from the one before, adjusted along the way, until by the twentieth century the inherited tradition had drifted a long way from where it began.
HIPP, as I see it, is less a claim to authenticity than a refusal of that drift: an attempt to cut through the accumulated layers of translation and move back toward the source. Start with the raw materials: wooden recorders, a German harpsichord, gut strings at A=415. Put behind them players who have studied the writers of the period, who left us a rich tapestry of how music was performed, contradictions and all. That brings us closer to Bach's time than Lowe's example of Emmanuel Pahud on a metal flute.
Richard Taruskin would push back, and fairly. In Text and Act (1995) he argued that much of what passed for historical performance reflected late-twentieth-century modernist taste more than eighteenth-century practice. I take the point: any reconstruction is made by people living now. But that's an argument for humility about the results, not for abandoning the method.
Musical Preferences
We all have preferences. Some readers may never stray from, say, Andreas Staier or Pierre Hantaï for Bach's keyboard works. Both are formidable harpsichordists. Ms. Lowe prefers Angela Hewitt and Glenn Gould, likely not because both are Canadian. Though wildly different in approach, both are (or were) consistent in their performances. I have found Gould's performances highly engaging, if wholly anti-historical in approach. I'm perfectly at home listening to any of these four, although if I had to choose a favorite, I'd be hard pressed between Staier and Hantaï. The truth is, the music should speak to us, and I think if Bach (or any other long-dead composer) were here, he'd have his own preferences too. He might hear Hewitt and declare he doesn't need to hear a note more from anyone else. We'll never know, however far these fanciful thoughts might take us, musically or philosophically.
There are listeners today who draw a line: they only want to audition HIPP recordings. They believe in something about HIPP. The idea of starting with the raw materials and performance techniques germane to the period resonates with them. They know they aren't hearing Bach perform his own works, but they still want the closeness to Bach that exists, in theory, along that continuum.
Others will dismiss Staier or anyone else at the harpsichord because that sound, that instrument, isn't of this time. Or, more bluntly, they don't like it. All fair.
However, since Ms. Lowe states her preferences, parts of her case read to me as a defense of what she likes. That's perfectly fine as taste. It's less convincing as an argument against HIPP.
Musical Intentions
Composer intentions are fundamentally difficult to establish. Lowe challenges the idea that historically informed performance necessarily brings us closer to Bach's intentions. Even when we know the instruments and conventions available to him, we cannot confidently establish precisely what he wanted listeners to experience. She sees the very concept of realizing a composer's intentions as philosophically problematic.
Here I'd shift the ground. Much of Bach's music in his own time was performed by Bach himself and by those in his immediate circle: family, students, the Leipzig musicians who played under him. In that setting, intentions didn't need establishing. They were in the room, implied by Bach himself. Take the same question and apply it to music separated from us by nearly three centuries, and it becomes largely moot. A performer can make decisions because they think the composer would have liked it one way or another, but that belief needn't dictate the performance. I'm sure Hewitt and Pahud each believe they are meeting at least some of Bach's intentions.
The eighteenth century had its own view. Here is Mattheson, writing in 1739:
Those who have never discovered how the composer himself wished to have the work performed will hardly be able to play it well.
Arcangelo Corelli shows both the appeal of that idea and its limits. His Op. 5 violin sonatas traveled across Europe, and in 1710 Estienne Roger published an Amsterdam edition with the slow movements ornamented, presented as Corelli's own, as he played them. Call it Mattheson's sentiment turned into a product: buyers wanted to know what the composer did. In practice, though, performances of Corelli by amateurs and professionals alike must have varied enormously, by regional style, by the player's ability, by local pitch standard, and by which ornaments, if any, a player subscribed to. Many professionals wouldn't have needed a printed guide at all, however popular the edition was.
Mattheson speaks for his time, and he's worth hearing. But intent, for me, isn't the same thing as familiarity with the milieu around a piece: the instruments, the pitch, the conventions of articulation and ornament that any competent player of the day would have assumed. That milieu is knowable in a way intention is not. Our job as interpreters is to understand it, and then to accept it or reject it.
Mattheson notwithstanding, the notion that there is a single pure expression of a composer's art is largely a later convention, one that grew with the passage of time. There are composers today who put more ink on the page telling you how to play their music than on the notes themselves.
So I'm not sure HIPP is about composer intent. It's about the practices of a time rather than the wishes of one person: understanding there's more to musical performance than what was left on the staff, whatever intentions the person who left us the manuscript, or its copy, may or may not have held.
Greater Expression
Modern instruments may offer greater expressive possibilities. As a former serious flautist, Lowe particularly appreciates the technical and tonal capabilities of the modern Boehm-system flute. She argues that centuries of instrument development have expanded performers' expressive options.
There's little to argue with here, except that the expressive options available to Pahud on the modern flute didn't exist for Bach. And yes, Bach may have loved Pahud's flute or his playing. But then we're writing science fiction.
The truth is Bach didn't have these expressive opportunities. To use them in his music is a choice, as is the choice to limit oneself to the tools he had during his lifetime. Lowe's is a legitimate preference for maximizing expressive possibilities, but it's a preference, not a refutation. I'm not opposed to Bach on a modern organ or on the piano. But I also see value in putting my own ears in the sound world of a historical figure.
I think of the fireworks Handel might have experienced at the first performance of his so-called Music for the Royal Fireworks. I am no expert in pyrotechnics, but I know what he didn't experience: the kind of light show a city like New York or Hong Kong puts on to ring in a new year. We're open to playing his music with our modern fireworks, but they're something foreign to Handel. We don't have to reject the past; we can marvel at our musical place now as much as at the musical place of the past.
The One and Only Performance
Lowe dislikes HIPP's claims to interpretive authority. She recalls the influence of Roger Norrington, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and John Butt during her Cambridge years. Her objection is particularly strong when historically informed performance becomes prescriptive: the suggestion that one interpretation is correct because it follows historical scholarship. She resists the notion that scholarship confers exclusive interpretive legitimacy.
I won't argue with this one, because I believe strongly in the authenticity of a musician's own voice in performance. But I would raise this notion of correctness. Most professional musicians who play, say, Bach have gone through a musical education system that teaches you how to perform, with guardrails. Some dislike the conservatory system, yet the majority of the classical music world subscribes to it.
I'd call it coloring within the lines. Stay within the lines with a limited number of colors, and you pass. You are correct. But there's also space for those who color far outside the lines, or, to extend my analogy, who stay within them but use Day-Glo colors. Glenn Gould might be such an example, given his touch and speed in his 1955 Goldberg Variations. We accepted Glenn because he was so different (though not all of us did; some reject him because his color choices were too garish).
I can't speak to Lowe's experiences at Cambridge, but musicians are sensitive to performance norms. It's not surprising that some would rally support for something new (HIPP) and want to declare it the new way: a corrected correctness.
I'm not offended by that, so long as we can articulate why one approach is better than another. Scholarship can tell us what was done. It can't make the choice for us.
Museum Instruments
Historical instruments remain intellectually interesting to Lowe. She doesn't dismiss instrument research or reconstruction. Indeed, she describes becoming fascinated by contemporary attempts to redesign the oboe da caccia, balancing historical characteristics against modern improvements in playability. She appreciates the scholarship while questioning whether it should determine performance choices.
There's been some movement out of HIPP lately, with ensembles attempting informed performances on modern instruments. Reinhard Goebel, founder of Musica Antiqua Köln, makes this distinction in his collaboration with the Berlin Baroque Soloists.
Again, this is about sliding a needle along a continuum. A modern string ensemble might fool me, but only if it articulates its bowings accordingly and lays off the continuous vibrato. But a modern oboe for an oboe da caccia, a flute for a recorder, or a piano for a harpsichord are not that close. As much as I don't want to prevent a violinist from interpreting Bach on a modern violin (with fine tuners and a chin rest) and a contemporary bow, that instrument offers the performer choices that never constrained Bach. It's why I'm very comfortable with Gould. He didn't limit himself, even if some of his choices oddly chased a historical sound.
What can I say? Ms. Lowe likes modern instruments. That's reason enough to listen to them. It isn't a reason to reject HIPP.
Conclusions
Lowe's strongest philosophical objection to HIPP concerns the difference between recreating historical conditions and recreating historical experience. Those aren't the same thing.
But there's a limitation in her reasoning. Historically informed performance needn't promise to transport listeners into Bach's consciousness. It can instead use surviving evidence about instrumentation, articulation, tuning, tempo, ensemble size, and performance conventions to inform interpretive decisions. That is a more modest, and more defensible, objective.
Similarly, her observation that modern instruments have expanded technical possibilities doesn't establish that they are better suited to Bach's music. Greater capability isn't synonymous with greater appropriateness, or even with how the music might move us.
Lowe approaches this as an analytic philosopher and a listener with strong aesthetic preferences, rather than as a scholar of eighteenth-century performance conventions. That discipline produces sharp questions about what it means to call an interpretation authentic. It's less suited to weighing the particular historical evidence behind any given performance choice.
The essential takeaway is this: Lowe doesn't reject historical performance research. She rejects the idea that historical reconstruction grants an interpretation special authority over the musical experience, particularly when that authority is used to dismiss the expressive possibilities of modern instruments.
Both Lowe and I agree with Goldfine, who says:
But what I love about Bach, and I think what a lot of people who both listen and play, is that it's just infinitely deep. Like, these simple things are very deep, and the complex things are even, like, you can spend your whole life, like, listening to the Art of Fugue and trying to figure out how it's going to go.
But yeah, so that there, if you get too far from the aesthetic experience of listening to the music, the whole game is lost, I think.