MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssssssssssssiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiccccccccccccccccaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqquuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRReeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssssssssssssiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttttttttttteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedddddddddddddddddddd OOOOOOOOOOOOOOnnnnnnnnnnnnnn tttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeee ffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttttttuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeee ooooooooooofffffffffff ttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeee pppppppppppaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssttttttttttt Musica Antiqua Revisited Index 2 Prefatory note 5 Introduction 6 Letters 39 Programme Musica Antiqua Revisited 40 Report on the debate Musica Antiqua Revisited 48 Partners 2 | PREFATORY NOTE In the wake of the neo-classicist current in the first half of the twentieth century, a renewed interest in period instruments and early music emerged. After 1950 this movement became trendsetting and it gained momentum from 1970 on. The Flemish contribution was considerable. A steadily increasing number of Flemish musicians proved their mettle as outstanding performers, both with and with- out an ensemble of their own. They shared their musical vision with the most demanding audiences throughout Europe, and later worldwide. It was in this period that Musica originated, then still called “Flemish Centre for Early Music”. This organisation managed to secure a unique niche in the Flemish musical landscape by engineering courses, concerts, and modest festivals. In 1983 Musica railroaded a number of encounters between the key players in early music: musicians, organizers, musicologists…This resulted in the foundation of a publishing house (Alamire), the publication of a periodical (Musica Antiqua), and many other exciting things. This also enabled the breakthrough of some Flemish ensembles and soloists, taking advantage of master classes, concerts, and festivals. In short: the initiative meant a powerful stimulus for historically informed performance practice on the concert platforms. In the quarter century that ensued, historically informed performance practice enjoyed an exponential growth, the movement expanding all over the world. More and more performers got steeped in it. While initially the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque were appreciated as productive periods, gradually also classicism and the nineteenth century were discovered as relevant. Even twentieth-century music became subject to performance on the basis of historical sources and traditions. 3 | The founding fathers of the movement stuck to their guns, while concurrently there was an ever growing influx of new and young performers. Some of these young performers interpret the old sources from a contemporary point of view. This resulted in confrontational discussions about repertoire and the tolerance threshold to qualify performances as “historical” or not. There was also pressure on the terminology. The English term “Early Music” still sounds friendly; for the French, Musique Ancienne is apparently palatable enough; but the Dutch term Oude Muziek ended up with a somewhat negative connotation. Sometimes Historically Informed Performance is used as an alternative, but this specialized term is somewhat cumbersome for a general audience. Eventu- ally all this culminated in a discussion about the approach to historical music. Was stylistic faithfulness to be cherished indefinitely in terms of obeisance to a dogma? What about contemporary interpretations of early music? To what extent do sources need to be respected? Are intersemiotic adaptations accept- able, too? With a view to making the discussion more productive, Musica took the initia- tive in 2009 to organize a new forum for an exchange of opinions. Flanders Music Centre and the REMA (Réseau Européen de Musique Ancienne) both decided to endorse this initiative. The whole event was hosted by AMUZ (Festival of Flanders Antwerp). The meeting was called Musica Antiqua Revisited and was organized on August 30, 2009, during the last day of the festival Laus Polyphoniae in Antwerp. Herman Baeten Director Musica réseau européen de musique ancienne european early music network 5 | INTRODUCTION The initiative Musica Antiqua Revisited had been thoroughly prepared. For starters, Musica got in touch with a number of players from the world of historical performance. This triggered a considerable amount of re- sponse. From the reactions it transpired that there was a lot of controver- sy. It became rapidly clear that having an elitist assembly was less attrac- tive than an open debate. Flanders Music Centre was prepared to support the initiative and co-organize it, and AMUZ (Festival of Flanders Antwerp) offered in addition to the venue also their logistics in terms of ideas. We took ample time for the preparation. Several formats were considered and a number of potential speakers for the debate were approached. Eventually we managed to develop an interesting format that was also honoured with adequate response in the press. Meanwhile a cycle of correspondence was induced between Sigiswald Kuijken and Björn Schmelzer. They belong to the older and the younger generation of musicians respectively, and both of them are very active as performers. The weekly Knack published the letters online. The debate was further prepared with some more informative articles in the weekly. The results of the discussion afternoon Musica Antiqua Revisited are being published in this publication. You can enjoy both the letters and a summary of the debate. We have opted for a bilingual edition in its en- tirety because the discussion deserves an international echo. The problems that are singled out here as well as the vantage points of the audience can contribute to a discussion across the borders. What is the locus of histori- cal music generally, and the role of young performers more specifically? We need a clear sense of direction among organizers, musicians, and educational institutions if we want to avoid devaluation of the achieve- ments of the last decades in the 21st century as eccentricities, if we want to pursue research of our historical musical heritage. This choice will not be supported anymore by a vacant segment of the market, readily available in the previous decades. This choice will need to legitimize itself fully by quality, choice of interpretation, knowledge of the sources and most of all: by dealing creatively with the musical parameters of the past. Hopefully this publication will contribute to an international debate about the place of our musical heritage in the present landscape of the arts. A comparable debate is already happening in the other arts, but music has one extra parameter: the ever recreated interpretation of the score. Always performers will reach new interpretations on the basis of new insights or of their personality. Therefore playing a score will always be a celebration of particularity, eliciting questions forever and refraining from inflicting a consensual interpretation. 6 | LETTERS 1. Letter from Björn Schmelzer to Sigiswald Kuijken Antwerp, 15 April 2009 Cher maître, Dear fellow artist, Dear Sigiswald, We were going to exchange letters, as agreed. We were determined to write to each other, but not casually. The letters were meant to have a certain sig- nificance. Moreover, they were going to profile two generations of musi- cians who have been dealing with early music, thus clarifying the recent past and the near future of what is called “a movement”. For that was supposed to be the focus of the letters, making them useful for everybody concerned with the movement’s future. Our meeting in Brussels a couple of months ago, Sigiswald, had fired my enthusiasm for that idea, and what’s more: I appreciated the honour of being able to share my preoccupations with you through correspondence. Compared to other genres, early music has not been pampered with a lot of literature, corre- spondence or essays. An opportunity to provide a dramatic shift, I felt, or at least a first step. However, very soon my intentions were overshadowed by serious doubt. To be honest, Sigiswald, even though I have only just started I’m already at a loss. What is there to say, what is there to write? On the one hand I think: early music, who cares? On the other hand: our concern with performance practice, instrumentation, interpretation, etc., is that what is of genuine interest for the music sector, from performer to consumer? Apparently there is a need for a debate on early music and its future, but my question is: where does this need come from? What is the subject of our debate, what do we worry about, and why can we be bothered with this? Outside it is raining, Sigiswald, and here inside, in the pub “Welcome” at the Dam in a proletarian district of Antwerp there are lively discussions about the lotto, about the amount of tips one should give, and, of course, about politics and women. The pub is getting crowded. The umbrella- stand, too. The environment is stimulating. What at first sight looks so alien to the sacred, aristocratic, elitist attitude of early music, ironically enough, brings me back to the core of what drives us to devote ourselves to early music: life itself. The reality and the life that are inherent in old repertoires. When I look at the old bar-addicts, I don’t wonder what they would think about early music and its future 7 | LETTERS – whether they would perhaps think of singles by the Beatles, cabaret or juke-box: they evoke the atmosphere of these repertoires of days gone by; they are themselves the incarnation of those phenomena and point towards their essence, their intensity. I have the impression, Sigiswald, that we share a certain quest, but I don’t know yet precisely what this quest entails. Perhaps you could call it to some extent the iconoclasm of established culture, or rather: a stripping- off, a peeling-away of the multiple layers of cultural evidence, resulting in a practice that activates the potential of the unimagined, the unseen or the unheard from past. Does this sound rather abstract? Admittedly, I’ve not yet reached clarity myself, but I hope that my letter will gradually clarify things as it goes along. The future of early music: is there a nicer paradox? This is the reason why I love the concept of “early music”. “Early music” resists easy takeovers. Rather than a conservative tendency it is the expression of an unruly, his- torical complexity: it doesn’t look as though it has a future by definition, except perhaps a subcutaneous, subterranean one. But why worry so suddenly? Is the label sold under false pretences? Why do people start to wonder what early music actually implies? Is it a genre, a style, or a branch, a craft, an artistic choice, a medium, a movement, a path? And on the easy assumption that it is a movement: are we then part of it? Are both of us and so many others to be subsumed under the same label? Do all of us defend the same aesthetic ideology? Further questions intrude. Who is it that worries? The recording indus- try? The music sector? A new generation of managers and impresarios? Is the problem related to the crisis of the CD market? Changing choices and tastes of committees that grant subsidies? Is it a symptom of a general decline in lifestyle? A chronic lack of appreciation of our heritage? “Early music. As good as dead. Reanimation! First of all, we have to get rid of the name. Sounds too pathetic.” How often that needle sticks in the groove of managers and culture watchers. Reason enough for me to prefer the proletarian Dam precinct to ponder – media vita – what concerns us, rather than sitting in a conference room at a music centre. At least here you stay alert and you don’t forget that easily what performance practice is all about. Taking stock and discussing perspectives for the future are perhaps symptoms of a crisis or a sclerosis in the genre, but all the same they can be expressions of a professionalizing trend that focusses more and more on marketing strategy, box-office success, profitability. Is there a larger audience for early music than in the past? Is there a younger audience? Perhaps, but that doesn’t really look relevant to me. Such analyses don’t seem to reveal anything about what makes early music intrinsically tick. I don’t know how you feel about this, Sigiswald, but it seems to me that a genuine reflection on early music starts with its internal paradox. The relevance of early music has to be weighed depending on the functioning or dysfunction of this paradox. What kind of paradox is at stake here? Early music looks to me like a 8 | LETTERS sort of avant-garde movement that, even while breaking with a sclerotic concept of the past, yet refuses to make tabula rasa, unlike the real avant- gardes of modernism. Perhaps this can be conceptualized as post-mod- ernism or a second avant-garde, it doesn’t matter very much; early music deals with the past as past, i.e. as a historicity that we are cut off from, while concurrently believing in the possibility of resuscitating the un- heard new of that past in a contemporary performance. On the one hand there are the early repertoires that are now being per- formed, expecting from the audience a kind of instant “Einfühlung” (empathy); on the other hand there is the consciousness of their infinite distance. Performances of early music are less concerned with the search for authenticity of origins, but more with the (im)possibility of a transpo- sition to a contemporary audience and the problem of refraction mani- festing itself in the experience. This paradox emerges very clearly in the appreciation of early music: the concrete performance is concurrently the necessary condition for the experience of the musical artwork from the past and an impediment to it as well. Because the aesthetic appreciation of an historical artwork coincides fundamentally with its discontinuity in terms of functionality or commodity, and its decline into both ruin and monument. However, what interferes with this decline is the concrete, historically informed performance practice, because its aim is a sort of pristine rendition, not affected by time. This recreation/reconstruction is therefore by definition a denial of its monumentality. This is the paradox and the stake of so-called authentic performance practice: in the interpre- tation time appears as in a crystal, origin and genesis at the same time. Perhaps you have different ideas about this, Sigiswald, but for me this is the essence of what is called “historically informed performance practice”. For me a performance therefore always results in an experience and a sensation of an entre-deux, caught in the middle, balancing between a past that is foreign, distant, exotic, and concurrently a past that is intimate, familiar, dormant – never really absent, at most forgotten or repressed. To perform early music is something like injecting the past as it was never heard before, imparting a simultaneous sensation of distance and proximity. It seems to me that this experience happens at a pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic stage, and is basically musical. Historical perform- ance practice is, as a consequence, hard to apply to a theatrical text by, for example, Shakespeare, because the dramatic experience relates to a large extent to the content, the situation and the meaning of the text, and because the theatre needs other means to transpose the “unheard” of the text into the actual performance. Conversely, however, some avant-garde theatrical theories such as Artaud’s seem to be closer to the performance of early music than to a contemporary adaptation of a canonical dramatic text. I remember that Artaud illustrated his Theatre of cruelty with an early sixteenth-century painting by Lucas van Leyden in the Louvre which had a tremendous impact on him, because the apparently pastoral scene that is shown in the foreground is coupled in a kind of inversion with the burning and collapsing fortified city that is hit by falling comets in the background. The sensation of an early music performance is essentially connected to the direct experience of this paradox. This has always struck me as par-