# The HIP movement and Das Glasperlenspiel



## Praeludium (Oct 9, 2011)

Hello,

whenever I hear/see HIP, I think of this famous roman by Hesse : Das Glasperlenspiel.

The people from the intellectual order of Castalia seem to only play ancient music (I haven't read about anything older than Schubert), with a strong emphasis on the Baroque music of the "masters of the past". They play it on period instrument, and they play it in a very rigorously historically correct way.

Now, the problem is that those people from Castalia have taken vow of being artistically sterile. They don't create anything, they just try to bring out the beauty of the Art of the past with purity.


I can't get this out of my head, and I'm actually feeling to feel pretty bad toward the HIP movement for this reason. I'm beginning to feel it's anti-artistic, in a way. Anti-creative.




Do you think historically informed music making is sterile ? 
Do you consider people into HIP as artists ? Or are they rather musicologists ?


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## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

There is room for creativity within the parameters of HIP. But I don't think it should be the only approach to music. There are wonderful things like Stokowski's Bach transcriptions and Bohm's Mozart symphonies that I would be sad to be without.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

I certainly don't see how there's a path forward for a strict HIP approach. However, the HIP movement has affected the way regular orchestras play. The renewed interest in chamber orchestras, the debate over tempi, even vibrato. So in that way, the HIP movement does contribute to the evolution of contemporary music performances.

But I would agree and say that HIP proponents have more of a museum-like perspective. Which is wonderful. Being able to experience something the way it was experienced 250 years ago is great. Its educational value is tremendous.

Personally, though, I like it better when the knowledge of past practices is used to look for new or different approaches instead of just reproducing itself for its own sake and claiming that this is the only legitimate way of doing it. There is something totalitarian about it, if it's taken too far.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

When HIP performances first started, they tended to be sterile. They were so focused on the historicity that they even had silly liner notes listing the pedigree of every instrument used. But in the past several years, I've noticed they've loosened up and become both historical and musical.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Conductors, soloists, performers, etc... are not involved so much in the creation of new art as in the performance of that which already exists. The performers of the "old school" approached all music as if it had been written during the Romantic era. Mozart's symphonies were rendered by an orchestra more in line with the scale of that employed by Mahler.

I believe that in one way what is happening with the direction taken by contemporary performers is that there is a realization that perhaps one doesn't need yet still another interpretation of Beethoven's 5th or Mahler's 9th... especially when technology has allowed us to access the finest recordings of the past. Many performers, soloists, and conductors have turned toward a repertoire that is not so glutted. They've begun to explore older repertoire as well as newer contemporary work.

This has undoubted had an impact on new music. Mid-century the battle lines were drawn between the Post-Romantics and the Modernists... each believing that their direction represented the future of classical music. The HIP-movement was part of the discovery of music beyond the classical tradition from Mozart through Mahler. Contemporary composers have found that they might build upon older traditions... Medieval modal music... music from non-Western traditions... music drawn from jazz and other popular traditions.

_The Glassbead Game_ posited a future world in which no new art was created. Rather, "artists" played with combinations of older, pre-existing art. Of course such "games" of collage and variation result in works of art no less original than any art of the past. I suppose one might imagine the whole of recording technology (not merely the HIP movement) represents something of a "threat" to contemporary music in the sense that today I have the option to listen exclusively to Medieval music, or Baroque music, or music of the Romantic era... and to wholly ignore what is happening in music today. On the other hand... the scale of the audience for "classical" music has grown astronomically when one considers the accessibility wrought by this same technology. If one checks the sales figures on Amazon one might discover that a composer like Schoenberg or Ligeti or even John Cage... in spite of their lack of popularity with the "masses"... actually reach an audience larger than that which Mozart or Haydn or Bach likely enjoyed during their lifetime.

Honestly, I seriously don't see how someone's preference for Bach or Monteverdi being played and sung in the manner in which they composed the work is any different than my preference that Wagner not be performed on Banjo and Kazoo and sung by the Louvin Brothers but rather be performed as he intended, or that performances of Hamlet should adhere to Shakespeare's intentions and not the warped penchant of some Eurotrash director with a thing for drag queens and Nazis. Nor do I understand how such expectations are "anti-artistic" or "anti-creative"... let alone likely to impact whether I also like Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass, or any other contemporary composer.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Praeludium said:


> Hello,
> 
> whenever I hear/see HIP, I think of this famous roman by Hesse : Das Glasperlenspiel.
> 
> ...


As I wrote in the Bach thread about HIP, Gardiner's set of cantatas sound different to Suzuki's. HIP has an overall parameter but within it, there is scope for different interpretation. Rene Jacob's Mozart operas versus Gardiner's, sound so different that is day and night.


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## NightHawk (Nov 3, 2011)

Very interesting question. Just as a performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 95 in C minor can be sterile etc., in a modern orchestra performance, so can the HIP performance be strait-laced, sterile, 'precious'. It really depends on the artistic director's musical gift and level of the players - pedantic or fully intuitive and creative. Many of the earliest HIP recordings were marred by bad intonation and tone quality in the winds...that is no longer a problem as we have better pedagogy in the performance area and we have better facsimile instruments. I think the scholarship on 'style' has also made gigantic leaps. I remember when vibrato was considered taboo in everything from JSBach and back - we know better now.

Hesse - haven't thought about him in some time, read several of his novels in my early 20's including 'The Glassbead Game' and can't remember a thing. 



Praeludium said:


> Hello,
> 
> whenever I hear/see HIP, I think of this famous roman by Hesse : Das Glasperlenspiel.
> 
> ...


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

I have mixed emotions about the HIP movement. It was certainly an interesting idea in theory to hear what the music of Bach,Mozart,Handel, and Beethoven might have sounded like, but I can't emphasize the word MIGHT enough .
That's just what we hear when we listen to any HIP performance, live or recorded . We don't have a time machine yet, so until one is invented, we will never know exactly what the music sounded like or exactly how it was interpreted . You see, th e HIP movement is based on a number of very iffy and questionalble assumptions . Among them are : 1. Old instruments,or copies thereof, sound exactly as they did in the past.
2. The music is being interpreted exactly as it was in the past and as the composers would have wanted .
3. Carefully studying treatises and other historical materials tells us exactly how the music should be played .
4. There is a right and a wrong way to interpet music . 5. We know the composer's intentions exactly.
6. The composer's intentions are an absolutley fixed thing , written in stone .7. Performances which do not use period iinstruments are "wrong" , distort the music and fail to do it justice. 8. Musicians who do not use period instruments are "uninformed" and ignorant of the "right" way to perform the music . 
9. A treatise by composer X on how to interpret music also tells us how to perform music by composers who were close contemporaries, or composers of earlier and later periods.10. HIP can and should be pushed further into music history, all the way up to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Whew ! That's assuming a lot ! 
But as the eminent American musicologist Richard Taruskin as so wisely pointed out ,"Instruments don't make music, people do ". The performance of music is not a paint by numbers affair ; just use period instruments ,
dutifully going through the motions of everything that is currently considered to be correct performance practice, and voila , a marvelous performance ! If only it were that simple !


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Continued : The truly important thing is the SPIRIT of the performance. The letter is another thing .
It's the duty of the perforner to bring the music as vividly to life as possible , not merely to observe the letter of the law. This is why so many non HIP performances of the past and recent years by great musicians are actually preferable to pedantically correct but dry as dust ones . 
I have enjoyed some HIP recordings very much (I haven't had the opportunity to attend any live ones),
not because of the period instruments, but because of the musicianship ,imagination and creativity of the 
musicians. 
Others merely seemed to me to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water . At first, I was not enamored of the sound of the instruents, particularly the gut strings, which tend to produce a dreadfully
nasal, pinched and wheezing sound . And having grown up with the sound of string vibrato since discoveriing classical music as a teenager , the lack of it seemed to me the aural equvalent of flat champagne .
It's now known that string vibrato , far form being an invention of the 20th century, has been in use for centuries , perhaps less than the 20th century, but it was definitley there. That's why Roger Norrington is dead wrong in demanding that orchestras he conducts play Elgar and Brahms with no vibrato. On the recording of the Elgar violin concerto with the great Fritz kreisler and the composer ocnducting, Kreisler uses ample vibrato, . There is no evidence of Elgar objecting to this.
I'm also not crazy about wooden flutes, which sound more like recorders than the familiar metal flute.
Someone has described the sound of the old-fashioned tympani as sounding like " someone being slapped in the face with a dead mackerel "


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

I've since become more accustomed to the sound of period instruments , but I still don't mind hearing Bach,Handel, Mozart,Haydn, and Beethoven etc on modern instruments, and it's actually refreshing to return to them !
What really gets my goat about HIP is not the performances themselves, but the sheer arrogance and snootiness of so many HIP musicians , such as Gardiner, Norrington, Bruggen, and others, ad their smug 
superiority and condescending attutude toward non HIP performaces . I can't stand their "more scholarly than thou" attitude , and the way they have often sneered at and dismissed "inauthentic" performances .
They don't have the humility to admit that they are giving,as I pointed out before, what the music MIGHT have sounded like. In effect, they are putting words in the mouths of long dead composers .
I hate it when they describe period instruments as a desperately needed "remedy" and "corrective" to those awful modern instruments , and they are finaly giving us a chance to hear the music as it should sound .
They are fond of pointing out that we can't assume that composers of the past would have preferred 
modern instruments if they could come back and hear them . No we can't assume this. But we also can't assume that they would have DISLIKED them, either . 
And do we really need HIP Brahms, Wagner,Bruckner, Elgar, and other composers of the late 19th and early 20th century? I heard Philippe Herreweghe's "authentic" recording of the Bruckner 4th not too long ago. It barely sounded different from the performances of such great Brucknerians as Jochum,Karajan, Knappertsbusch, Klemperer,
Boehm, Wand and Solti .


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Please excuse this interminable rant . Now we have an HIP orchestra n London for late 19th and 20th century music called The New Queen's Hall orchestra, named after an earlier London orchestra .
It purports ot give "authentic " performances of Briuckner, mahler, Elgar, Brahms, Wagner, and even Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams. It has recorded the first HIP version of the Planets by Holst ! Sheesh !
If you go to their website, I believe NQHrg ,  you will see HIP arrogance at its worst.
The insufferably smug and arrogant comments about how this orchestra is a desperately needed corrective to today's awful modern orchestras is enough to make your blood pressure rise dangerously. It certainly
did it with mine . Supposedly, today''s brass instruments are too loud and you can't hear the rest of the orchestra . This may happen at times, but it's invariably the conductor's fault , not the musicians.
What next ? An HIP Rite of Spring next year for the centennial of the legendary chaotic premiere in Paris ?
Where will HIP end ? With Ellliott Carter ?


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