HIPP Baroque

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

Hey everyone, if you have any background in classical music, or maybe even music in general, you might find this of interest. This is rather long post, but I hope you'll find it worthwhile. I'm a harpsichordist/organist and this is the sort of stuff I'm absolutely fascinated in.

If you've seen the music I've posted here, you probably know by now that I'm a huge baroque music nerd. Baroque is the period of music roughly 1600-1750. Most people only know the music of the late-baroque which is comprised of everyone's favorite powered-wig wearing composers in the period of 1685-1750 such as Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, Scarlatti etc.

It's not simply baroque music I'm into, but specifically a type of performance style of baroque music called Historically Informed Performance Practice. It's very different than what you're probably use it. This is a style of performance that has its roots in a small number of performers and scholars starting about 100 years ago, but it didn't really catch on until the 60's. It's actually become mainstream in academia in the past 20 years or so but modern classical musicians still get the most attention from the general public.

Basically, in this style we use older instruments (originals, or replicas) rather than the modern counterparts. The most dramatic example of this is the use of the harpsichord instead of the piano. But it's not just keyboard instruments that are different. The whole family of instruments have many differences compared to their modern counterparts. Violins for instance back in the baroque did not have shoulder or chin rests, had shorter finger boards, used gut strings, and had very different bow design. The later two differences make the greatest difference. Natural gut strings have a much warmer and textured sound than modern metal strings. Most bows back then had the wood of the bow curved slightly outward rather than inward on the modern bow. The older bow is lighter and enables greater articulation and nuance than the modern bow for baroque music. Trumpets back then were natural. They didn't have valves and were fairly basic. They also sound very different than modern trumpets. You'll find differences like these between on the old and modern instruments and they make a huge difference in the sound of the ensemble.

But it's not just what version of the instrument you use, HIPP practice also involves how you play the instrument. It's not just the instruments that have changed since the baroque, but much of our fundamental musicality has changed as well. The way we might play an old piece today is not necessarily the way they original audience would have expected it or liked it to be played. Thankfully though, we can reconstruct the way the music was likely played due mainly to the extensive performance literature that was left behind. Many famous musicians across the period left behind writing in the form of both small (letters, articles) and large (books) on how the subject of good musicianship and performance. It's quite surprising too to see how different they thought music should sound compared to way modern classical players might think it should sound. Vibrato (the expressive trembling sound) for instance, the most cherished basic expression of string and woodwind instruments in modern playing, had a very different role back then. In modern violin playing, violinists use a heavy amount of vibrato on every note they can use it on. But in almost every piece of historical writing we see vibrato being relegated to a role as a special ornament being used only occasionally which creates a completely different overall sound and blend in string playing.

Tempo (the speed at which you play the piece) was also considerably different apparently. Modern musicians tend to play baroque music at fairly moderate tempos. In the interests of historical performance, we want to know what tempos musicians generally played different types of music at. They left behind basic words of course on their music such as adagio and allegro, but how fast exactly is an allegro (is it 80-100, 100-120, or 120-160, etc)? A problem with knowing what general tempos baroque musicians played the music at comes from the fact that metronomes weren't invented until the late classical era. Thankfully, we can know the basic tempos they played at by other accounts they left behind. A famous german flute player named Quantz wrote one of the best tempo accounts in 1752. He established tempos for all the styles of music in his day in relation to the average human pulse rate (which he explicitly considered 80 beats per minute). From this, we can get accurate tempos and it's interesting to see that many of the tempos are faster than what most musicians today would expect. There are several other examples from across the period and from different lands that give us hard data about tempos and they all share remarkable similarities to each other. These come by appealing to things such as average walking speed, counting speed, clocks, intervals between church bell strikes, the time to sip a soup spoon (a rather odd example), as well as fine mechanical instruments and pendulums. A few works of music had the approximate time in minute and seconds and by a simple calculation you can get the approximate tempo. A classic example of how dramatic some of the differences can be is with the Minuet dance type. Most musicians play the Minuet today at a rather moderate pace of about 120 bpm. Almost all of the data though that we've reconstructed has Minuets ranging from 160 - 210 bpm.

Another difference is improvisation. Classical musicians don't usually improvise much anymore but it was a common practice back then. Soloists would deviate extensively from the written score, especially in slower movements. The primary job too of the harpsichordist/organist, lutist, and guitarist (yes, guitars often were used in ensembles back then) was to improvise a thick and complex accompaniment to the soloist and/or ensemble much like jazz performers might do today. This was a basic skill.

These are just a few of the differences. I could go on further, but it's better to hear the difference yourself.

Here's a piece you've likely heard billions of times, first performed by a modern classical ensemble. Note the slow tempo, the constant vibrato, and the overall heavy legato (smooth) playing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdRNTXaweoo

Here's the same piece, played at the more historically likely tempo. Also, note the smaller ensemble size, the little use of vibrato, the nuances of articulation, and the improvised accompaniment by the lute and organ:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E33kSyh2g40

Here's one more example:

modern:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq2WTXtKurk

historical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E9hozQMYwY

Anyway, hope you didn't find this boring.

[KichigaiNeko]

Fascinating TEGH!! I studied Music at high school level and loved the Baroque period/ composers

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

Yep.

It's an interesting field that has provided new ways at looking at and hearing the old music. Of course until we have time machines, we can't know entirely for sure that how exactly the music sounded, but we can arrive at approximation but continually researching and studying the data we have and testing it out. HIPP performance is now getting into classical and romantic music too lately. You can find many recordings of Beethoven on fortepianos now for instance.

Just one more example. The piece is from late baroque. This has very rich thoroughbass improvisation from the harpsichord and guitar. The violinist also does some improvisation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOTHiagFhqk

[Kayenneh]

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you for posting

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Wow, the more realistic version of the canon in D gave me goosebumps..

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you for posting

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Wow, the more realistic version of the canon in D gave me goosebumps..

You're welcome.

Here's another performance of it with a very good harpsichordist, and bit more spritely interpretation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtZjROpBReM

[Rev. Rye]

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you for posting

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Wow, the more realistic version of the canon in D gave me goosebumps..

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.

Of course, my favourite performance of Dido and Aeneas is a HIPP (Emanuelle Haim cond,) but I still have a respect for performances like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s00IuPkV-c

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

...

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.

[Kayenneh]

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.

Ah, I thought it was a cello of some sort. Did they also use those bows you mentioned in the OP?

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

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.

Ah, I thought it was a cello of some sort. Did they also use those bows you mentioned in the OP?

Yeah. It looks like baroque cello bow to me. Maybe its size is a little different to accommodate the instrument.

All of the performers in the historical videos above use baroque type bows.
There isn't exactly one type of baroque bow. They varied during different decades and locations. From what I understand, the shape of the bow gives a noticeable sound difference between down and up bows. Down bows sound stronger than up bows. On the modern bow, that difference isn't as noticeable. The baroque bow design is geared towards are more non-legato articulation. A true seamless legato is impossible on it because of the difference between down and up bows. Baroque bows can also make dynamic changes faster which is useful for articulation and nuance in baroque music.

Here's from top to bottom a baroque, classical, and modern violin bow:


The modern bow was invented during the late classical era. The late classical era and the romantic era valued legato articulation more than during prior eras so the newer bow that we're use to caught on because it enabled true legato playing. During the baroque however, by far the preferred default articulation was detached (in between staccato and legato). They preferred in normal playing a very slight silence between notes in performance on most instruments and their playing techniques and instruments were designed for this articulation. On the harpsichord and organ for instance, I don't use my thumbs as nearly as much as a pianist would. Keyboard technique for most of the baroque used "paired fingering" which basically has you playing scales using thumb crossing less or not at all. So, in the right hand, they'd play an upward scale: 1 2 3 4 3 4 5, and down, 5 4 3 2 3 2 1. The only articulation you can reasonable do with this sort of fingering in moderate to fast pieces is detached. Thumb under technique was a later invention that facilitates faster playing, but it can also bias players to using legato articulation too much if they're not careful. Modern thumb crossing technique is actually a late-baroque, not classical invention, but performers seem to have used it in combination with the older paired technique. It didn't take over completely yet.

Edit: forgot to mention. Don't confuse the baroque bow for the so called "Bach bow" or "german baroque bow." Those are bows that are ridiculously curved to allow for polyphonic chord playing. That's an early 20th century invention based on some wacky theories about Bach's violin and cello sonatas and have been thoroughly discredited since the 1940's. A few websites though talk as though it actually existed but they're crazy.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I thought I'd just add one more piece of information if you all don't mind. Improvisation like I said before was a big thing during this time. We have many written out examples from the period of what was considered good improvisation. Here is one of them. The middle staff with all the plain notes is the original solo violin. This is what you normally hear in modern style recordings today. The top staff however is an original written out example of what violinists were expected to improvise in performance back then: