|
Though from the late 1950s onwards William Glock at the BBC had already taken the initiative in programming early and contemporary music together (on 12th November, 1959, the BBC broadcast Stravinsky’s Mass together with the Tallis Lamentations, sung by Bruno Turner’s Pro Musica Antiqua; this initiated Glock’s famous series of Invitation Concerts which mixed old and new music), more recently, some specialist performers of early music have moved into the area of contemporary music. Notable examples are the Hilliard Ensemble, the Taverner Consort, Theatre of Voices, Fretwork; at various points The Sixteen, The Tallis Scholars, A Sei Voci and The Landini Consort, and, more recently, Anonymous 4. Paul Hillier has written in a number of articles about his experiences in working with Pärt, and how these paralleled his investigations into and performance of mediaeval music (the same flexibility of rhythm, for example, the same “whiteness” on the page). Such parallels are of the utmost importance when it comes to the moment of performance, as my own experiences have shown. It is rare, for example, that I need to indicate a metronome marking for any work I write for the Hilliard Ensemble; similarly, in Revelation, which I wrote for the Taverner Consort, and In Nomine, written for Fretwork, I was not faced with the necessity of indicating “orchestral” phrasing for the sackbuts or violas da gamba—these things arose by themselves from an instinctive understanding of vocal phrasing which is natural to performers of early music. These details of collaboration between composer and performers in fact indicate a new kind of performance practice, just as the rise of the post-serialists meant that performers had to absorb new ways of thinking and approaching the music in order to play Stockhausen or Cage, for example. It is nothing less than a meeting point between the past and the future.
This phenomenon leads naturally to the related one of the bête noire of early music, authenticity. I recall at a meeting of the Plainsong & Mediaeval Music Society in London once defending, as a composer, the right of future interpreters to perform my work (and I consider the same to be true of any other composer) according to their own lights; that any piece of music has its own life, independent of the composer, as soon as it leaves its creator’s desk. These observations were provoked by another member of the society who had observed that he wished to be instructed by specialist early music groups in the exact way that music was performed at the time it was written. These complex issues of authenticity have been well aired in various journals and books in recent years, and taking into account the stage of maturity at which early music performers have inevitably now arrived—a stage which allows us to discuss these matters from the most diverse points of view and to arrive at historically informed performances which are utterly different from each other—I think it worthwhile here to quote from an article by Pierre Boulez which was published in the journal Early Music some years ago:
“I know very well that there are a number of important composers who have insisted on their rights to tradition, Wagner and Stravinsky among them. Their claims were of course made in different terms, living as they did at different times, without the benefit of the same resources. Wagner attempted to found a school in order to establish an authentic performance tradition; he failed, for lack of money, but this perfectly legitimate desire to provide the foundations for an interpretative understanding of his work was subverted, after his death, into an inflexible code, said by many to be corrupt and fossilized. Stravinsky insisted that reference to his own recordings would demonstrate their unique documentary value; unfortunately, his unreliable interpretative gifts, together with the circumstances in which the recordings were made [...] prevent these testimonies from being taken as absolute models. For that matter, can such a thing exist? The truth of any interpretation is essentially transitory.”
|
|
|
|