History, Authenticity and the Experimental : An Ethnography of the Historically Informed Performance Movement in Sydney, Australia 2016-2017

Abstract

This thesis concerns itself with the manner in which history is perceived, produced, marketed, and received through the medium of classical music performance. Specifically, it is concerned with a group of classically-trained musicians operating in Sydney, Australia who describe their practice as ‘historical’ or (at the very least) ‘historically informed’. In this thesis, I introduce the reader to the world of Historically Informed Performance, or ‘HIP’ as it is acronymized by insiders. Specifically, this thesis sets out as an ethnography of HIP grounded in participant-observation. Drawing on phenomenological and semiotic theories of J. Lowell Lewis and Samuel Weber it seeks to answer the questions: ‘what is the Historically Informed Performance ‘movement’ to insiders, and how do they police its boundaries? And what sort of thing is HIP to insiders?’ Looking firstly to texts on and in HIP, this approach reveals a struggle between two seemingly irreconcilable insider discourses of HIP: on the one hand the historical ‘Authenticist’ position and on the other the ‘nondogmatic’ or ‘Experimentalist’ position. However, this thesis argues that such discursive definitions, while important, do not accurately describe HIP, and in the best case, they must be disseminated into practice. As such, notions of Historicity, Authenticity and Experimentalism must be understood as performed on an embodied level in events; through interacting habituated and habituating bodies. In this sense, HIP is constructed out of much more than rigidly defined notions of historicity. It is borne as much of a specific and contingent intimacy, the enactment of historical, consensual social-roles and the complex discipline of instrumental practices.