a habit, and research became a vital necessity.
Initially my research focused on the baroque flutes and recorders, as played from ca. 1660—the first appearance of baroque recorders at the court of Louis XIV, where the one-keyed baroque flute arrived some twenty years later—until the end of the eighteenth century when multi-keyed flutes became widely adopted. Soon after, I started studying the instruments, performance practice, and repertoire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Occasionally I extended my research into Renaissance flutes and recorders and their repertoire. Purely theoretical books and treatises for other instruments provided me with the general framework in which to integrate the flute. After all, the flute and the recorder are not such important instruments! Much more was written about the voice, the violin, and the keyboard.
It became obvious to me that a general historical-artistic truth cannot exist and that every performer’s conclusions inevitably depend on one’s individual choices, driven by one’s own artistic temperament, and made within the context of acquired historical knowledge. Research further helped me to understand the sound behind (or before) the notation and pointed to the necessity of “creative reading”; namely, learning to supplement what was not written. Even in the best situations, when this is done with respect for style and the genre and character of the music, we can only operate within a field of probabilities with fluctuating boundaries. I understood better and better that the very concept of authenticity in Early Music is considerably less clear or simple than it might appear at first sight.
As a result of my research I considered the notation to be mainly a type of roadmap, an aide-mémoire and help for invention, enabling the informed reader to create an inner image of the music. Quite naturally, this image is not definitive, but will change with time, mood, circumstance, and knowledge. Once this provisional image has been formed, in great detail, I can let it take an audible shape. In other words, I have to begin to play (or practice!) with the result clearly in my heart and mind. From this total concept, quasi-retrospectively and in constant interaction with the actual reading and playing, I shape my interpretation and determine all its performance parameters. In this sense, “early” music does not exist: the performance becomes a re-creation, the music is born at this very moment, the ink is still wet.
3
THE LIMITS OF NOTATION
Notating everything with utmost precision, if possible at all, would ask for a very great effort and look very complicated. It would also limit the performer’s freedom more than most performers or even composers would have wanted. In Der Critische Musicus (May 15, 1737), Johann Adolf Scheibe criticizes J. S. Bach’s habit of writing out the whole “method” of playing, with much elaborate ornamentation, as being confusing to the reader. This is quite understandable, though from our point of view, we might have wished that Bach had been even more precise. Neither Scheibe nor Bach could have imagined that the generally scanty notation of earlier centuries would cause us so many problems and endless discussions today.
The desire to write down music as precisely as possible seems to be a typical concern of our Western “classical” music, culminating in the twentieth century. Schoenberg is quite radical in the preface to Pierrot Lunaire op. 21 (written in 1912, first published in 1914): the performer should not add anything that is not written down. He should give no interpretation of the music, “Er würde hier nicht geben, sondern nehmen” (he would not give, but take away). Stravinsky is not less compelling when he states (as reported by Robert Craft in Conversations with Igor Stravinsky [1959]) that his music must be read and executed, and not interpreted. Similarly in 1924, he wrote of his Octet that “to interpret a piece is to realize its portrait, and what I demand is the realization of the piece itself and not of its portrait.” The extremely complex notation of many Boulez compositions can be considered as the logical consequence of this attitude. In the last third of the twentieth century, many composers reacted against this by developing aleatoric notation, graphic notation, and so forth. Sometimes the performers are requested to improvise instead of being given a fully written-out part.
Music can easily exist without notation, as we can see in other traditions, such as jazz, folk music, Gregorian chant, and Eastern music, where notation, if extant, is very incomplete and sketchy. Fundamentally, notation directs itself toward the wrong physical sense: toward the eye instead of the ear. We could paraphrase the German proverb, “Erzählte Musik ist wie ein gemaltes Mittagessen” (narrated music is like a painted meal) as “Notierte Musik ist wie ein gemaltes Mittagessen” (notated music is like a painted meal); we will stay hungry indeed! But where there is no extant living aural tradition, as in Early Music, the visual tradition has to suffice. However, this eye-notation must be decoded, and all too easily supposing that this decoding has been done in an identical way in all times and places leads us to wrong interpretations. Luckily, historical treatises do give us important decoding tools. As one would expect, the information is not unanimous, but it can put us on the right track; conversely, we might learn how the notation should not be read.
Anyway, the eye-notation must be completed by the aural experience. In performance, I continuously have to deal with fundamental questions such as: How does the hall sound? How will I integrate what comes into what I just played? What are my colleagues playing together with me? One practical consideration that is easily overlooked in today’s theory and practice is the presence or absence of a complete score. Orchestral musicians always played from their separate parts, but after all, they were guided by a conductor or leader. However, if the leader is the Konzertmeister or the soloist of a concerto, he might never have possessed or seen a full score of the composition he is performing. The same applies to chamber music, where many pieces circulated only in handwritten separate parts. If printed, string quartets, for instance, were only sold in separate parts, until well into the nineteenth century. One had to wait for the complete edition of the works of the “great” classical or romantic composers, before seeing their quartets in score. Mozart’s ten famous quartets appeared in score in 1828, shortly after Beethoven decided to have his last six quartets published in score as well as in parts (they were issued in 1826–27). He must have been one of the first to do so. Similarly he seems to have been one of the first to include letters in the score and parts, in order to facilitate rehearsing (among the quartets, they only appear in the Große Fuge op. 133, published in 1827). Did he consider these late works so complicated that the performer would need a score and, in the case of the Große Fuge, even letters? Bar numbers were generally included only in the second half of the twentieth century. Obviously, rehearsing must have been very different, without the help of bar numbers, letters, or even a score.
When most larger-scale compositions could not be studied through the eyes, only well-educated and experienced ears could tell how to react to what colleagues were playing. The performer had to trust his ears and to “feel” ahead—how did his playing need to be shaped by the other parts’ consonances or dissonances, parallel motion or counterpoint, rhythmic shape, ornaments, dynamics, phrasing, and articulation? The performer also had to trust his colleagues’ similar intuition, initiative, invention, and experience. This practice teaches the performers to listen to each other very intently; it might also have resulted in greater spontaneity and less ultimate “togetherness,” as can be witnessed in recordings from the first half of the twentieth century. In the same vein, most early orchestral and chamber music parts conspicuously lack handwritten indications of bowings, fingerings, dynamics, or ornaments. Were these details remembered through rehearsals, or did they matter less?
Even if a composition is notated with the utmost care and precision, it is not going to be performed or heard the same way twice, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Both the playing and the listening environment keep changing. By its very nature, art
