3 Historically informed performance

Broadly speaking, historically informed performance (HIP) aims to be faithful to what people heard when a piece was first composed and performed. Although HIP was a preoccupation of some earlier writers, the issues addressed in this branch of scholarship only became widely discussed and debated from the middle of the twentieth century. Publications such as Thurston Dart’s The Interpretation of Music (1954) began to provide an overview of some of the HIP issues that were taken up in later, more detailed publications such as the journal Early Music (founded in 1973) and influential books such as Frederick Neumann’s Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music (1978). Initially, many of the questions that were asked concerned the performance of music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but that period subsequently broadened to include both earlier and later music.

How possible, or even desirable, is it to recreate the types of performances experienced by previous generations, especially those from the prerecording era? This question became a subject of debate almost as soon as HIP performances began to emerge. A popular view of these sorts of performances, at least to begin with, was that they were as close as possible to the sorts of events the composers of the time would have known. But several holes quickly began to emerge in this assumption and in some instances the appropriateness of using early instruments has been called into question.

Researching HIP involves the study of a wide range of sources. As well as the instruments themselves, sources include personal texts such as correspondence, diaries and memoirs, evidence found in public documents, such as civic papers and newspapers, iconographical sources (pictures, engravings, etc.), and musical scores.