HIPP Baroque

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

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Yes. It sounds like it's almost another work entirely. That said, there are still some times where I prefer an "inauthentic" performance, like Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach, or, the performance of the St. Matthew Passion with Otto Klemperer, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer Dieskau I listened to last Good Friday.

That's fine. I have no problem with that. My interest is mostly historical. I'd like to get as close to the original sound as possible. Modern style musicians usually are not concerned about that.

"Authenticity" is a term the early music performers of the 60's, 70's, and 80's used. It was dropped in the 90s because most people find the term rather arrogant (for good reasons). And we know now that many of those so called "authentic" performances contained large anachronisms that the performers of the time were blind to (or just didn't have the resources to avoid).

"Historically Informed Performance Practice" is the new term that's been widely adopted. It's preferable because it acknowledges that we don't know everything. There's no doubt some anachronisms in today's "HIPP" recordings. For instance, there're debates going on right now on the way they used bass instruments. It seems that the practice of pairing a cello with a double-bass wasn't as universal a practice as we assumed. And there's even debate as to whether the "cello" used was necessarily the same kind of "cello" we think of. There's a type of cello that some researchers are starting to think was fairly common called the violoncello da spalla, which means "shoulder cello." You can see three of them used in that Brandenburg No. 3 video above. Bach may have even written his cello suites for that instrument.

There's a controversy that's somewhat comparable to the debate over the historical versus mythical Jesus among musicians (in terms of just how controversial it is). There's one side that thinks that Bach's St. Matthew Passion was written for a full choir, while a number of researchers are arguing now that the score was meant for just individual singers, not a choir. The debates over this have been pretty heated. Another older debate that's largely settled now was over whether dotted pairs of notes would have been played at a ratio of 3:1 or 7:1. That was a huge debate that lasted for 25 years during the last century.