BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Welcome to our new series, What the Fact?!
Throughout 2018, we’re teaming up with talent at the Australian National Academy of Music to bring you informed answers to real questions and topics about your music career.
Ever wondered why you feel performance anxiety? What the deal is with tuning to 440Hz – or not? How to lead an orchestra? We’re here to tell you all about it.
Enter Howard Penny, head of strings at ANAM (and the dude in the picture). We settle in for a chat with this cellist because we wanted to know what the deal is with HIP (that’s Historically Informed Performance, you hipster).
If you’re a musician wanting to present music the way it might originally have been performed, you’ll want to read on. With Howard (who will present a whole heap of baroque music this month), we explore the qualities and relevance of HIP today – for the modern listener and musician.
Howard is a Canberra-born, Vienna-studied musician who took out the ABC Young Performers Competition, and was a finalist in the Prague International Cello Competition. He’s performed across Asia, Europe, and Australia and has played for more than 100 music recordings. He’s also a guest director of the Australian Youth Orchestra National Music Camp and Chamber Players programs, and since 2007 is a member of the Artists of the Australian National Academy of Music.
Let’s hack HIP!
Howard, baroque music. Why do you love it?
Baroque music is a whole and immensely varied world, from Spanish-influenced but locally inflected music from 18th Century Bolivia to the highly stylised musical language of Versailles.
It was a period of both experiment and refinement, and there is so much hugely colourful repertoire waiting to be explored!
Tell us what Historically Informed Performance practice means to you.
As both my parents were historians, I am acutely aware that we cannot recreate the past, but also that understanding both the past and present benefit enormously from seeing things in their specific context. Nothing exists in a vacuum. And, conversely, there is surprisingly little in history that is essentially truly new, so examining precedents and consequences can truly enliven our understanding of artistic expression of a particular time.
Why should we care about HIP today? We may also consider it impossible to replicate HIP experiences due to so many physical factors (venue, instrument, audiences shaped by contemporary listening habits, the list goes on…)
It is especially relevant today as we are the first period in musical history not to be primarily occupied with performing contemporary music; i.e. music of our time. Musicians and composers previously may have studied older masters to a point, but concert life was almost exclusively music of the minute, so the language and idioms of style were immediately understood.
Also, all composers played, and all players composed, so there was a fuller understanding by all of the nuts and bolts of musical expression of each time and place.
We are presently in a time of (over)specialisation, and we tend to see compositions as predecessors of the present, rather than – which would have been the case when they were written – as the result of what had gone before. A performer, of course, must remain an individual in order to truly re-create, not re-produce, a work in the moment. But I feel it is an obligation (and a fascination!) to try to understand as much as we can of the elements of the musical language of a given time.
Music functions very [much] like a spoken or written language, with grammar, syntax, punctuation, inflection, idiom, etc. So we should learn our ABCs. The more one understands about how a piece of music is put together, and the rhetorical and artistic devices used to create the expression, the more truly free an interpretation can be. And truly meaningful, rather than a free-form emotional indulgence.
How do HIP approaches change over the years?
I think truly great musicians have always consciously or unconsciously thought in these terms: a Toscanini or Bruno Walter could be, in my view, fairly close to what Brahms might have expected. Whereas a one-size-fits-all, ‘faster-is-better’, modern recreation can leave one feeling oddly empty. Or, at worst, being lectured. It’s a balance of knowledge, talent, artistry, and humility that yields best results, I feel.
The concert you’ll present with ANAM is called International Baroque, which is so telling in itself. Not only do you have to know about the practices of one country’s performance, but the way each country differed! What are the challenges of learning HIP across the nations?
I am riding the coat-tails of the true specialists here: I have always been fascinated by what is common to musical expression across time and place, as well as what gives works a particular flavour or idiom. I intended this program primarily as an introduction for our young musicians to exactly this way of thinking about music, while giving the audience a really great night out, showcasing so many extraordinary composers and compositions that rarely get aired in the concert hall.
The challenges? It is like learning several languages – and I am certainly not fluent, but I do have a certain amount of conversational skills!
For listeners of International Baroque….how can they judge if it’s HIP or not?
I would really prefer our audience not to be trying to give a score out of 10 for authenticity – whatever one imagines that to be – but to relish the variety, and colour, and power of these pieces! A spoiler: all the hardware will be modern…
Any parting words of advice for budding HIP practitioners?
Stay curious, and musical. At the end of the day, composers wanted their pieces to communicate emotion and drama, but really getting inside how music works is a great aid to inspiration. And remember that dogmatic thinking has usually proven to be misguided, in any historical period…
See Howard perform alongside and direct ANAM musicians in International Baroque, 7.30pm May 18 in ANAM, South Melbourne Town Hall.
Check back in soon for our next What the Fact?! with professionals in the music industry.
Images supplied – credit Pia Johnson. Emoji via APACHE – License 2.0.
