I want to say a bit about the contemporary phenomenon known as the early music movement. Through the history of Western music there has been a natural evolution in the types of instruments—say, the change from the gamba family of strings to the violin family—and technical improvements in existing ones, such as the nineteenth-century addition of keys to winds and of valves to brass. There have been some exceptions to this evolutionary rule; for example, the general agreement is that the string instruments made by the Stradivari family and a few others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are unsurpassed. (Most of their instruments, though, were in the nineteenth century taken apart and refitted with longer fingerboards, to suit the requirements of the time.)
As with the evolution from the harpsichord to the piano with its greater range of volume and touch, there was a tendency to consider the various evolutions to be a matter of sainted Progress. At the same time, performance styles also evolved, and in the absence of recordings each historical era and region developed its own habits of playing. So, when the larger Bach pieces were rediscovered toward the middle of the nineteenth century, he was played on the instruments of the time and in the style of the time, which meant adding effects of volume, articulation, and phrasing to the music.
In the twentieth century, however, there came an interest in older instruments, and that in turn led to an interest in how those instruments were played. Classical groups sprang up here and there sporting recorders, shawms, lutes, and the like.
When the early music movement really came of age in the 1970s, the attitude was, “We’re going to play music on the instruments the music was written for, in the style they were played in the time, as best we can ascertain.” There was a degree of self-righteousness in this endeavor: we’re more authentic than you are. As a new generation of musicians got busy mastering baroque violins and recorders and gambas and lutes and valveless horns and the like, scholars studied every performance treatise available, mainly ones from the eighteenth century, for clues about performance practice of the time.
I remember in 1977, the first time I heard a recording of an original-instrument orchestra, which was playing Mozart’s G Minor Symphony. I was thunderstruck. The opening melody in octaves, which in a modern large orchestra had always sounded logy, here sounded lithe and lucid. I could clearly hear every part in the orchestra down to the second bassoon. It was thrilling, as if the music were reborn. An experiment: listen to a version of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks in the usual version for modern orchestra. Then listen to the original version played by an early music band—say, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. You’ll find the original was rowdier and more fun.
Over the decades the early music movement spread steadily, until by the 1990s original instruments had largely claimed the baroque repertoire for itself and was making inroads in the classical period. We came to appreciate the sighing of strings played without vibrato and with convex bows rather than modern concave ones, the sound of gut strings rather than metal, the mellow sheen of gambas, and of course, the tinkling of the harpsichord. The revival of Renaissance and medieval instruments opened up a large and wonderful repertoire that had been rarely and only tentatively heard before. Meanwhile, the performing style that grew up in the movement favored smaller bands, leaner textures, faster tempos. There was a general tendency to pull back on emotional expression, on the theory that it was too romantic, not baroque enough.
The triumph of the early music movement, though, also exposed its limitations and delusions. No matter how many treatises we study, we really can’t know what Bach and anybody else before modern times sounded like playing their stuff. Many vital things are not possible to know at all, so the musicality and imagination of performers has to step in. Eventually the early music movement owned up to this reality by pulling back on claims of “authenticity” to the more modest, “historically informed performance” (HIP). In that guise, the skinny-and-zippy HIP style of performance spread into mainstream concert halls and modern instruments.
Nobody I wager today questions the value of all this. It’s manifestly worthwhile to hear the sounds a composer wrote for, in some semblance of the performance practice of his time. In addition to research, original instruments in themselves can reveal a great deal. Beethoven complained mightily about the limitations of the pianos he had to work with. All the same, he wrote music geared for those pianos, as you discover if you hear the music on period instruments. The first movement of his “Moonlight” Sonata is directed to be played with the sustain pedal down the whole time. Because the resonance of a modern instrument is much longer than Beethoven’s piano, that can’t be done today—it would sound like a tonal traffic jam. You have to find some way to fake it. Hearing Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata on a piano from his time, you realize he’s exploiting registral contrasts that don’t exist on modern pianos. His pianos had boomy low registers, fairly mellow middle registers, and bright high registers, and they sounded more woody than modern pianos because their frames were wood rather than steel. On a period piano, the maddened end of the “Appassionata” sounds as if the music is tearing the instrument apart, and that’s an important element of its emotional effect.
These matters remain highly complicated. The more you recognize the complications, the more the idea of authenticity dribbles away. For one example, yes, Mozart usually worked with orchestras having ten or twelve strings, but he himself said that if he had his way, his orchestra would have had fifty violins. The idea that skinnier sounds and faster tempos are always better has led to performances where there are no slow tempos at all; everything boogies along like a dance. I submit that this isn’t “authentic”; it’s inexpressive and unmusical. Meanwhile, the setting of music is enormously different now than in the past. Most music today is played in concert halls. In Mozart’s day, chamber music was played in private music rooms, piano sonatas in private. Nobody has proposed to revive that—or the fact that a great deal of music played in the past was done with little or no rehearsal. Most performances before the nineteenth century would probably sound to our ears, in a word, lousy.
What I’m saying is that the early music style is not authentic so much as it is simply a modern playing style for early music. For me, the relentlessly fast tempos often heard these days can tear the guts out of the music. In any case, styles change. The steady, metronomic approach to tempo that appeared in the earlier twentieth century, replacing the flexible tempos of romantic playing, is still largely the norm. Eventually somebody will seriously listen, for example, to how Mahler played his own work—there are recordings of him on piano—and absorb his style of flexible tempos into a new approach to late nineteenth-century music.
As a teacher, how would I grade the early music movement and its influence? In terms of reviving original instruments, I’d say A, if not A+. In terms of its effect on the playing of baroque and classical repertoire, I’d say B+, if I was feeling generous. The enrichment the movement has given to music is unquestionable. But ends remain more important than means. “The best history has to give,” said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “is the enthusiasm it arouses.”
In any case, the early music movement is an indelible part of the continuing evolution of Western classical music, which has to evolve to retain its vitality and importance and relevance. Ours is the broadest, most kaleidoscopic musical tradition in the world, with over a millennium of constant exploration and renewal. In it everyone can find places and passions. What is necessary is to continue the journey, to find new places and new passions.
So, there’s our tour of Western music from eons back to a few years ago. How do I, as a composer and writer, add all this up? Music is here to enjoy, to love, to be fascinated and moved and instructed and amused and scared and exalted by. I believe that a composer’s job is to provide those experiences for us. If and when audiences for classical music are ready to be moved by myriad voices and languages, when audiences are as excited about hearing something new as they were in Mozart’s day—then music will thrive. The works being composed today are part of an ongoing experiment in that direction.
To finish, I want again to take note of the stupendous scope of the music I’ve talked about. One of the great virtues of Western music is not only its enormous technical journey from monody to polyphony to homophony, from evolving tonality to evolving atonality, triads to tone clusters, simplicity to complexity, a small palette of colors to an enormous palette, austere to impassioned, calculated to crazed. It has also shown an ability to absorb into itself ideas and voices from around the world, and from popular music and jazz, while still remaining itself. For me the incomparable breadth of reference and style over the past millennium may be the most remarkable aspect of Western classical music. Of course, we haven’t seen the end of that evolution and never will.
What do I foresee in the future? I decline to speculate. A recent study found that when it comes to prognostication, there’s no difference between prophecies of the future and random outcomes. Whatever happens, it will not be what anybody predicted, unless by accident. What we can say is that the human spirit is endlessly creative, and musicians like all artists will keep doing what they do. In the process they will continue to reveal beautiful, sublime, enchanting, provoking, frightening, fascinating, exalted, comic, rude, marvelous things. Whether presented in terms of sounds, strings, brass, stone, wood, canvas, film, paint, or what have you, in the end art is all made of the same inexhaustible material as the human spirit.