1 - Joining the historical performance debate

Summary

HINDEMITH AND ADORNO, AND SOME PRELIMINARY ANTINOMIES OF HIP

Some of the parameters of the debate over historical performance were set many years before the movement became a truly public phenomenon in the late 1960s. For instance, the commemoration of the year of Bach's death in 1950 occasioned diverse opinions on the way his music should be performed: the prominent composer and performer, Paul Hindemith, advocated the wholesale restoration of the instruments and performing practices of Bach's own age:

We can be sure that Bach was thoroughly content with the means of expression at hand in voices and instruments, and if we want to perform his music according to his intentions we ought to restore the conditions of performance of that time.

Here we have the fundamental assumption that a composer fits effortlessly and contentedly into the culture of his own age, that what he got coincided with what he wanted, and that a restoration of contemporary performing conventions will thus coincide with the composer's intentions. Given that Hindemith himself was one of the major composers of the age, the suggestion that we might wish to follow the composer's intentions must have carried some considerable force in 1950. Both Hindemith's historicist attitude and his productions of early music were of tremendous influence on Nikolaus Harnoncourt who, perhaps more than anyone over the next twenty years, made the case for HIP.