3.1 The authenticity debate
‘Authentic performance’ was a term popularly used at the start of the HIP movement in concert advertising, reviews, and so on to denote the use of instrumental and vocal performance styles and techniques contemporary with the composers whose music was being played. But how ‘authentic’ could this experience be? This was a question asked by several writers in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The term ‘authentic’ was questioned and subsequently largely dropped. Claims of ‘authenticity’ were simply too questionable. Nowadays the term ‘historically informed’ seems a more measured way of describing the performance of music on early instruments using techniques that have been informed by research into earlier practices.
As the authenticity debate has matured, some features of contemporary HIP begin to look rather strange and incongruous. Consider Figure 3, for example. Here you have a photograph, like many others, of a performance which uses early instruments appropriate to the ‘Baroque era’ which, roughly speaking, may be considered to have ended in the mid eighteenth century. Given that the performers are using early instruments you can assume that they were trying their best to play in historical styles appropriate to the music they were playing. Yet there are so many modern features in the image. The staging in a purpose-built performance space bears no resemblance to the venues in which Baroque-era performances would have taken place, while the performers are separated from the listeners, which is a modern trend. The musicians are dressed in clothes that recall the early twentieth century much more than earlier times. Then there is the conductor in front of the harpsichord: conductors of orchestras like this were not features of performances of this sort of music until the nineteenth century (Bowen, 2003). To what extent, then, can the performance represented in this image be regarded as ‘authentic’?
