On Cutting (and Pasting)

Sometimes playing early music consists of actually playing music, but very often it involves a lot of arts and crafts. This comes from one of the hypocrisies of the historical performance movement. We perform at historically approximate pitch, with historically informed techniques and off of facsimiles of manuscripts and historical editions, and yet we hold ourselves to very modern standards of performance.

Take intonation for example, I find it likely that standards for intonation were very different in the Baroque. In string playing, eighteenth-century musicians would not have had access to as reliable strings as we do, they couldn't control the temperature or humidity of their environments as well as we do, they didn't have electric tuners (or even tuning forks until 1711) as we do. There are treatises that complain about poor intonation which I read as proof that musicians were often out of tune. They may have wanted perfect intonation (as we aim for) but I doubt it was possible, especially in large ensembles.

Another example is the Baroque trumpet. During the early music revival when pioneers were first exploring valveless trumpets (which are limited in range to the natural harmonic series) they deemed them "impossible" to play well and added holes to improve the intonation. Even the best and most famous historical trumpet players today all have these holes because it's agreed that without them, too many "mistakes" occur for modern audiences (and conductors!) to accept.

This brings me to my current peeve in early music, the fable of unity and continuity throughout a larger work. I think this notion was probably born in the mid-19th century (does anyone actually know the history of this?) when "music-as-high-art" really got going. If you go to the symphony today you will be looked at derisively if you are so uncouth and unknowledgeable as to clap between movements. This wasn't always the case. People used to clap after every movement and if there was enough applause, the movement would be played again (remember, there were no recordings). This practice holds over in opera where people clap after arias despite the interruption of the plot.

Music in the Baroque was entertainment (and I don't mean this pejoratively at all!), whether it was music for dinner or dancing or for the stage, it was functional. We have copies of the scores people performed off of and there are page turns in the middle of movements (!) marked, "turn quickly." No one had page turners, they didn't line up four stands in a row so that they wouldn't have to pause to turn a page. So it seems to me that our modern aesthetic of continuity is behind the hours I spend cutting and pasting parts together for myself to eliminate or abbreviate all page turns.

I played a recital last week where I taped four or five sheets of paper to each side of a large piece of cardboard in order to avoid disrupting the flow of a cantata by shuffling my pages. I routinely turn pages while playing an open string (a good trick!) and toss them on the floor because I have no time to place them elsewhere. As a 20th-century being, I appreciate dramatic flow in a work, unencumbered by the often messy reality of playing it. But I don't think this was a priority in the Baroque. Surely they turned pages, surely they tuned between movements. In a rehearsal yesterday, I had to keep tuning between movements (in a rehearsal!) and the conductor asked me why I had to tune so much. I told him I had put on a new string (which was true) but I wanted to say, "Does it matter why? Would you rather I play out of tune? This is the reality of playing on temperamental gut strings during the lurching forward of Spring weather!" But if we want to appeal to a modern audience, we must perform up to modern standards and make compromises in our historical accuracy. At what point are we compromising too much? When do we lose sight of the point of what we do?