Authentic performance

The authentic performance movement is an effort on the part of musicians and scholars to perform works of classical music in ways similar to how they were performed when they were originally written. The movement had its beginnings in the performance of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, but subsequently came to incorporate the Classical and even Romantic eras as well. The two methods adopted by authentic performance artists have been to use historically appropriate instruments and to rely on written evidence from the past to gain insight into how the works were originally played.

Recovering early performance practices

Recovering the available written information about how music was performed in the past is a difficult scholarly task, requiring fluency in multiple languages, skill in navigating old archives, and thoughtful judgment in weighing sometimes contradictory evidence. Both pedagogical works and the correspondence of musicians from past centuries play an important role. Representative of the works from which valuable information has been obtained are the following:

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• Syntagma musicum (1614-1620) by Michael Praetorius
• Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen ("A treatise of instruction in playing the transverse flute," 1752) by Johann Joachim Quantz
• Versuch über das wahre Art das Klavier zu spielen ("An essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments," 1753-1762) by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
• Versuch einer grundliche Violinschule ("An essay on the fundamental principles of violin playing," 1756) by Leopold Mozart

Among the letters of musicians, those of Mozart are notable for their liveliness and insight, and from them considerable information about performances of his work is obtained. In the case of Haydn and Beethoven we have the advantage that they became very famous–in fact, venerated–in their own lifetimes, and many people with whom they conversed attempted to remember and write down their words.

Related Topics:
Mozart - Haydn - Beethoven

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Occasionally, the written record tells us things we might prefer not to know. For instance, a letter from Haydn (Oct. 17, 1789) says:

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:Now I would humbly ask you to tell the princely Kapellmeister there that these three symphonies because of their many particular effects, should be rehearsed at least once, carefully and with special concentration, before they are performed.

Related Topics:
Kapellmeister - 90-92

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implying of course that symphonies were often performed with no rehearsal at all. Likewise, there is testimony that the task of keeping early instruments in tune was difficult and perhaps also neglected. One critic wrote in 1684:

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:At the beginning of the concerts, we observe the accuracy of the chords ... some time after, the instruments make a din; the music is for our ears no longer anything but a confused noise.

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Such evidence is a reminder that authentic performance must aim at the highest ideals of past music making, rather than what was achieved on particular occasions.

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Interpreting musical notation

One area in which scholarly interpretation is quite crucial is in interpreting the musical notation of the past, which becomes progressively less explicit as one goes back in time. Some familiar difficult items are as follows:

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• Early composers apparently often wrote dotted rhythms (where the first of two notes is three times the length of the second) to mean instead a time ratio of 2 + 1, in a context where triplets are present elsewhere in the musical line. The opening line of the last movement of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #5 is a good example.
• In a French overture, it is often held that dotted notation was meant to indicate double dotting; that is, a duration ratio of 7 to 1 instead of 3 to 1. A well-known example is the overture to Handel's Messiah, often played in the double-dotted manner by authentic performance specialists.
• Particularly in Baroque music, music written in even rhythm is sometimes performed rather as if the notes were dotted or in triplets, in a practice known as notes inégales and similar to the swing feel of jazz.
• What is written as a appoggiatura is often meant to be quite long, taking half or even more of the duration of the immediately following full-size note. This convention is pervasive in Mozart's music.
• In Renaissance music, musica ficta are employed; these are accidentals (sharps and flats) not written in the score, but rather inferred using the performer's judgment or via rules laid down by theorists.
• Lastly, the notes of earlier music cannot generally be interpreted as designating the same pitch that they do today, since concert pitch has frequently changed. For discussion, see pitch (music).

Linguistic issues

An additional relevant area of scholarship is the determination of how the languages of sung music were pronounced at the time of first performance. Such information can help in establishing rhymes and in aligning the syllables to the musical notes (underlay). The disciplines of historical linguistics and philology play the primary role here. Some early music performers prefer to sing using the old pronunciations, feeling that the notes sound better when sung to their original syllables.

Related Topics:
Historical linguistics - Philology

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Issues of pronunciation even carry over to church Latin, the language in which a huge amount of early music was written. The reason is that Latin was customarily pronounced using the speech sounds and patterns of the local vernacular language; see Latin regional pronunciation.

Related Topics:
Latin - Latin regional pronunciation

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Tuning

Twelve tone equal temperament is the predominant tuning today, but was not so in the past. For many periods tuning may have depended upon region, varied by composer, with some composers even preferring different tunings at different times in their lives. However, it is often hard to determine exactly what these tunings were.

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