Nostalgia. What a kick. And what a commercial boon for the music industry. Love the sound of 60s pop and 70s disco? You need the original synths if you’re a composer or producer. You listen to music on digital streams? Loser! Join the retro-future of vinyl enthusiasm, and feel the grooves under your fingers like your parents or grandparents used to. Or you can even make music physical again through the horrible medium of cassettes: all that plastic, all those tiny liner notes, all that high-speed dubbing.
Retro-futurists cherish what they claim is the extra warmth and sonic richness of vinyl, but there is no acoustic reason why vinyl is better. It is in fact objectively worse as a carrier of sonic information than any high-resolution stream of the same track, song or symphony. For cassette nostalgists, if it’s got that old-fashioned tape hiss, it sounds more “real”. We’re now looking for things to sound less clean. Because we distrust today’s technological utopia, we want signs that our music is less polished, less perfect, and thus more human.
But what the recording industry is doing now with its return to vinyl, classical music has been doing for decades. Musicians and musicologists have long been obsessed with learning about the origins of the music they study and play, to experience what the technology of instruments and performing cultures of earlier centuries actually sounded like, whether the 12th-century Germany of Hildegard of Bingen or the 19th-century Vienna of Beethoven and Schubert.
David Munrow brought medieval and Renaissance music to the mainstream across TV, radio and recordings in the 1970s and showing what instruments such as shawms and crumhorns could do; Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner set up choirs and ensembles to do the same for 17th and 18th-century music, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt led the charge through the music of later centuries, putting the ethos of early music research into the lifeblood of chamber groups and large-scale symphony orchestras in music from Schubert to Bruckner.
But where the claims for vinyl or cassettes’ “authenticity” are bogus when it comes to actual sonic fidelity, it’s different when comparing older instruments in classical cultures and their modern counterparts. Earlier instruments have different qualities of sound and expression. The sound and feel of a harpsichord that Bach was writing for in the 18th century is vastly different to a grand piano made today: the plucked strings of the harpsichord mean that the sound of each note disappears quickly, where a Steinway can create halos and continuities of sound. French horns that can play in any key are taken for granted today, where previous generations had to literally pull their brass instruments apart to play one set of notes or another. It’s a similar story for strings and woodwinds, as earlier generations of musicians had to play with the temperamental realities of gut strings that don’t stay in tune, and reeds that couldn’t be relied on.
But the sounds that earlier orchestral instruments make aren’t “worse” in the way that cassettes or vinyl are. Instead, their differences invite other ways of playing for the musicians, and they open up new dimensions of feeling for us. The difference between Bach’s music when it’s played on modern instruments in what is now – ironically – an old-school approach, using vibrato in the strings, lush lyricism in the rest of the orchestra, and full-scale choral forces, compared with the leaner sounds that smaller period instrument ensembles make, isn’t only a difference of soundworld, it’s a gulf of meaning and feeling.
Listen to these two performances of the opening chorus of Bach’s Matthew Passion: Karl Richter conducting his massed Munich forces in 1979, and Paul McCreesh leading the Gabrieli Consort in 2003. They’re playing the same piece, but these are radically different experiences. Richter’s reading of the work is about making a vast immovable musical monument, while McCreesh’s – played nearly twice as fast, using just one voice to each part – is an invitation to us as individuals to empathise, to bear witness, to be part of the drama.
That’s the key: these are new, contemporary feelings that period instrument performances open up. As the pianist Vikingur Ólafsson said, the idea that if you play on old instruments you’re making the exact sounds that Bach, or Beethoven or Mahler would have heard is neither truly possible, and nor is it the point. Our ears, our bodies, and our whole listening culture is different. (Which reminds me of Janeane Garofalo’s immortal cameo as the “serving wench” Melinda in the medieval-themed restaurant in The Cable Guy: “There were no utensils in medieval times, hence there are no utensils at Medieval Times. Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?”)
In the final few Proms concerts of the season you can hear the latest developments of classical’s retro-future explorers, all playing “period instruments”. On Thursday, the musicians of Arcangelo perform Bach’s B Minor Mass on original instruments, and the next night, there’s Mahler’s Ninth symphony from the Mahler Academy Orchestra playing instruments that fit the specifications of the ones that Mahler himself ordered for the Vienna opera in the early 1900s. Period instruments have more grain, more colour, more guttural directness and more lyrical intensity than their modern counterparts and so to my mind are better equipped to reveal the emotional imperfections, ambiguities, and expressive complexities of the music they’re playing.
That makes me sound like a cassette-fetishising nerd. Oh dear … In fact, I’ll go further and say that performances such as the Mass in B Minor and Mahler’s 9th at the Proms will have an authenticity that no recording format, analogue or digital, can reproduce. These are one-off performances that will be made and witnessed by those human beings, true to themselves in every moment. All these historical instruments aren’t really about getting closer to past times but to the power of the present tense.
This week Tom has been listening to: On repeat, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Proms with Kirill Petrenko. I know, I’m a broken record on this, but their Elgar and Tchaikovsky was inspired and inspiring: they found new depths of feeling and resonance in every moment. Magic.
