The Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement aspires to perform music through a reconstruction of the performance conditions and styles appropriate to the time and place in which the repertoire originated. Although the concept stems from 19th-century historicism, HIP only took shape as a countercultural movement opposing the conservative performance establishment in the mid-20th century. By the late 1960s, it had become a significant force in the concert hall. Like many oppositional—if not outright revolutionary—movements of the late 1960s, HIP adopted a radical ideology and claimed to represent authentic musical performance. The flip side of this claim to authenticity was a direct challenge to the traditional authority of the conservative musical establishment, which HIP accused of inauthenticity, ignorance, and even falsification.
It did not take long, however, for the authenticity claim to prove a double-edged sword, exposing HIP to criticism from both within the ranks of the movement and without. By the early 1980s, HIP practitioners began to distance themselves from the concept.[2] This article seeks to examine the HIP movement’s tendencies toward both authenticity and historical awareness, particularly in light of the new technological possibilities now available to performers in this field.
In matters of performance technique and notation interpretation (i.e., performance practice), the historical performers’ abandonment of the ideal of authenticity appears sincere—and has brought with it significant benefits. Reconsidering the goals of HIP softened the movement’s literalist reading of musical texts and encouraged performers to step beyond the written notes: they developed ornamentation techniques grounded in historical sources, cultivated “period improvisation,” and even composed new works in historical styles—not as mere exercises, but as fully artistic creations.
However, when it came to the instruments used in HIP, the rejection of authenticity and of the term “authentic instruments” was far more hesitant. In fact, it was never fully realized. HIP performers still attach great importance to the instruments they use and to employing historically appropriate models. Most uphold a policy according to which, for example, the types of recorders, violins (and bows), and organs suitable for Monteverdi differ from those appropriate for Telemann; the viols and harpsichords best suited to the music of Ortiz or Byrd differ significantly from those suited to Marin Marais or Couperin.
This approach directly affects performance practice. First, early music performers often own and use a wide array of instruments, each chosen to suit a particular repertoire: a violin bow appropriate for early Italian music, and another for eighteenth-century German music; a flute tuned to a’=440 Hz for Italian Baroque music, and one tuned to a’=392 Hz for the French Baroque.[3] Second, HIP performers are meticulous in listing the instruments used for each piece in concert programs and accompanying recording notes. When a historical instrument is used, the builder’s name and year of construction are provided. When a newly made instrument based on a historical model is used, the name of the original historical builder, the model’s date (if known), and the collection or museum housing the original instrument are also specified.
Even though the ideal of “authentic performance” was abandoned four decades ago and replaced by the more flexible ideal of “historical awareness,” the ideal of “authentic instruments” still beats at the heart of HIP ideology.
The significant technological advances of recent decades have presented HIP with unprecedented opportunities to experiment with both well-known and obscure repertoires—but they have also posed challenges to the movement’s ideological foundations. Advances in recording technology have made it possible to capture performances on instruments that would otherwise be lost in the acoustic space of a modern concert hall (e.g., viola da gamba or clavichord), but doing so often necessitates artificial balancing of volume levels, a process that can hardly be called historically informed, let alone authentic. Similarly, digital editing allows for “perfect” recordings but undermines the spontaneity and improvisatory spirit that HIP values so highly.
Yet it is precisely a recording supervised by one of HIP’s most articulate advocates—scholar and performer John Butt—that presents a case study challenging even the core ideological tenets of the movement, particularly the issue of “authentic instruments.” In early March 2017, the Scottish baroque ensemble Dunedin Consort, conducted by Butt, recorded Claudio Monteverdi’s famous Vespers of 1610.[4] As in previous Dunedin recordings, Butt determined the ensemble size, instruments, tuning, temperament, ornamentation, and tempi in line with the original performance conditions of the work.
However, no suitable seventeenth-century Venetian church organ could be found in Scotland for the recording. Butt’s solution was a “virtual organ”—a digital keyboard connected to a computer loaded with sound samples of a Venetian organ located in a church in Izola (in present-day Slovenia). This instrument, composed entirely of plastic, electrical circuits, and silicon chips—without a single piece of wood—produced the sound most closely approximating that of a seventeenth-century Venetian ensemble.
In other words, this recording suggests that even some members of HIP’s ideological “hard core” have come to accept that a digital instrument—arguably the most anachronistic tool imaginable—might in fact bring them closest to the historical ideal.
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It is no surprise that the church organ is what brought to Dunedin the case study discussed in this article. For hundreds of years, technological progress was harnessed to solve problems arising from the church organ’s size and complexity. The problematic location of the console—dictated by the acoustic considerations of where to place the pipe systems (registers)—eventually led to the console’s separation from the main body of the instrument and the use of pneumatic (and later, electric) transmission. Over time, the operation of the bellows also became electric. Alongside sweeping changes to pitch systems and tuning methods, by the early 20th century the church organ had become a very different instrument from its Baroque predecessors, let alone from earlier organs.[5] Indeed, organists of the Organ Reform Movement (Orgelbewegung) sought to return to the ancient configuration of the instrument decades before the rise of HIP—before their colleagues who played other instruments began preferring "authentic instruments" over their modern descendants.[6]
Electricity also opened up new possibilities for designing smaller, cheaper, and more portable organs, such as the Hammond organ. Although the Hammond’s sound became very popular with jazz and rock musicians thanks to its unique timbral qualities, its tone production mechanism diverged significantly from the church organ’s sound. Synthesizers, too, which were programmed to produce sounds resembling those of flutes or oboes, offered a sound quite different from that of the traditional organ.
A group of electric instruments that offered a fundamentally different approach from electric organs or synthesizers is that of "samplers"—to which Dunedin Consort’s “virtual organ” belongs. Instead of producing sound acoustically, electrically, or by a hybrid method, the sampler does not "produce" the sound at all but plays back a recorded sample. Samplers began appearing in the 1960s. The most well-known was the Mellotron—a keyboard instrument whose flute-like tones open The Beatles’ *Strawberry Fields Forever*. The Mellotron didn’t generate sound acoustically, electrically, or electromechanically; each key simply served as a play/stop button for a dedicated magnetic tape. If loaded with a tape bank of "flute" recordings, each key would play a tape of a flute sounding that particular pitch. For example, pressing middle C would play back a tape of a flute playing that note. Although the term "sampler" only came into widespread use after the 1960s and thus was not used to describe the Mellotron in its early days, its underlying logic was indeed that of a sampler: each keypress triggered a “sample” of a pre-recorded sound mapped to a specific pitch.
HIP was only in its infancy at that time, but theoretically, the Mellotron’s technology could have been used to sample the sounds of a historical Venetian organ.
As long as mechanical tape playback was required, samplers were unwieldy and fragile. Toward the end of the 1970s, digital instruments—including samplers—began to store sound samples not on tape but in computer memory. These digital instruments allowed performers to record and load their own samples. The best-known example of such an instrument is the Fairlight CMI. A sampler could now serve three main functions: mimetic/reproductive (imitating an instrument or performer by using sound samples recorded from them); manipulative (altering the sample in real time, usually by changing pitch and playback speed); and extractive (removing the sampled sound from its original context and inserting it into a new one).[7] Since any sound or noise can be sampled into a sampler, they were adopted across a broad range of styles: avant-garde, modern concert music, pop, hip-hop, and, of course, various forms of electronic music.
The act of sampling—and its increased accessibility through digital samplers—heralded a revolution in how instrumental sound production was conceived. It is thus unsurprising that samplers also forced the music world to confront an unprecedented array of ethical and ideological questions. One issue was copyright: sampling from commercially released recordings became common in hip-hop and rap and turned the intertextual web of musical references in these styles into a legal minefield. Another issue was the fear among professional studio musicians that samplers would take their jobs.[8] Over time, both issues have lost some of their sting—copyright violations involving samplers in the late 1980s were later dwarfed by the tidal wave of copyright issues brought by the internet a decade later. And although samplers have become more sophisticated, they still cannot capture the full nuance of human performance on traditional mechanical instruments. Different instruments challenge the sampling process in different ways: flute and violin sounds involve a variety of attacks; the envelope of piano sound varies drastically between loud and soft playing or between short and sustained notes. The substitutes samplers currently offer for such instruments are generally not considered satisfactory by most performers and audiences in classical or early music.
However, compared to other traditional mechanical instruments, the nuances of organ performance are relatively easy to replicate via sampling. As a result, "virtual organ" samplers—such as the Hauptwerk software—have gained popularity even among HIP organists. One factor enabling the virtual organ’s legitimacy for HIP purposes is its minimal use of the sampler’s manipulative function, which is arguably the most problematic from a HIP perspective. Samplers in popular and modern music often make heavy use of manipulation: users will sample only a few pitches from the original instrument’s range and then digitally stretch or compress those samples to cover the entire range. For instance, one might sample a middle C from an electric guitar (approximately 262 Hz) and then digitally shift it to sound a major third higher (330 Hz) or lower (208 Hz). Using the same spectral properties across a range of 800 cents (eight semitones) can sound highly artificial and contradict the HIP ideal of “authenticity.”
By contrast, a virtual organ assigns a dedicated audio file to each pipe in the sampled organ. Artificial pitch shifts are only used in tiny intervals, such as when changing temperament. For example, if the sampled organ was tuned in equal temperament and the user wants to simulate a historical meantone temperament, the necessary pitch shifts would not exceed a quarter tone (50 cents). Other manipulations—like filtering, phasing, or distortion—are common in other genres but are not used in virtual organs, which are designed for the concert or church music community from the outset.
Possible objections to the inauthentic "touch" of a digital keyboard are largely irrelevant to the virtual organ, especially when compared to “real” organs. Pneumatic or electric transmission systems already distance the performer’s touch from the sound production mechanism. The few organs whose historical keyboards have survived are not only rare and difficult to play but also hard to gain permission to use. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that playing on a keyboard whose shape and materials have degraded over centuries offers a similar experience to playing that same keyboard when it was new. In exchange for the compromise of not using a historical instrument, the performer gains not only access to the historical organ but also full control over central aspects of HIP: the organ’s tuning and temperament, access to all of its registers, and even the reproduction of its incidental mechanical noises. In this way, virtual organs surpass even instruments specifically designed for the HIP market, such as digital harpsichords or Roland’s classical organs (C30, C330, C380), which offer only limited control over tuning and temperament and a much smaller number of sound systems.[9] Do all of the virtual organ’s advantages justify the bold compromise of playing a fully digital instrument?
Again, popular styles that also adopted the sampler offer useful points of comparison. For instance, the work of a DJ who creates music for dancers is a kind of “performance” requiring virtuoso command of instruments such as the turntable, drum machine, and sampler. As vinyl records declined, DJs abandoned these instruments in favor of software. Initially, vinyl records were replaced by CDs, and later by digital files. However, the unique manipulations DJs had performed by hand on vinyl—scratching, spinning, mixing—were so central to their artistry that it became necessary to develop digital substitutes not only for the *sound* but also for the *gesture* of performance. This led to systems that simulate the interface of a turntable without using actual vinyl—DJs could spin a disk-like surface instead. Later, software allowed users to create music in real time without traditional DJ skills. This drew fire from critics with rhetoric suspiciously reminiscent of that used by hip-hop purists — first and foremost, the claim that DJs who don’t use vinyl aren’t “authentic.” [10] Naturally, the great importance ascribed to the issue of “touch” closely resembles the matter of human touch in classical musical instruments.
In the liner notes for the Dunedin recording, Butt is careful not to adopt an apologetic tone and argues:
The solution here [...] was to employ the Hauptwerk virtual organ system. This, it must be stressed, is not equivalent to an ‘electronic organ’ in its traditional sense; [...] [This] aspect of the recording is essentially a recording of another recording, as if the organist were playing the instrument in its original location and the sounds were relayed to Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, where this recording took place.[11]
The manner in which Butt seeks to justify his artistic choice is intriguing. He even reinforces the aforementioned assumption that replacing the mechanical organ console with an electronic keyboard and eliminating the organ’s transmission system are of marginal importance in performance—certainly less significant when compared to melodic instruments. It is highly doubtful that Butt would have used a sampler to replace other instruments on the recording, such as the cornett or the sackbut. Yet the claim that countless triggerings of samples from the Venetian organ are equivalent to playing that organ and transmitting its sound to Greyfriars Church opens the door to complex questions: Is playing the sampled organ truly equivalent to a “whole,” while performing with the sampler is merely the “sum of its parts”?
First, one must consider whether the sampled sounds document only the tones emerging from the organ pipes themselves, or whether they also capture the sound alongside its myriad reflections from the church’s walls and floor. If the samples were taken with a sensitive microphone at close range, they do not record the church’s acoustic signature, which is an integral part of the instrument’s character. This acoustic character was likely taken into account by the historical builder of the organ, who would have constructed the instrument to sound optimal in a specific architectural space. Playing a virtual organ sampled without the church’s acoustic imprint in a small room creates an unnatural situation: a church organ with hundreds of pipes—some longer than the room itself—produces no reverberation at all. It is difficult to describe the resulting sound in such a case as “historically informed.”
On the other hand, if the samples also capture the complex—and to some degree chaotic—sequence of acoustic interferences and reflections within the church, the resulting sound is not necessarily more natural. Playing an instrument together with the sampled acoustic signature of the space in which it was recorded, inside a new space that introduces an additional layer of reflections, creates the illusion of an impossible acoustic environment. At the very least, it produces an unnatural relationship between the sampled instrument and any other instruments participating in the performance. Imagine a scenario in which the virtual organ accompanies a string ensemble in a small, acoustically “dry” room: the strings will sound dry, while the organ will resonate as though in a reverberant church. Do the sampled sounds reflect the organ’s resonance in an empty church or a full one? As heard from the nave or the apse? And from what height?
Whether or not it is perfect, the sampler’s act of “assembling the whole” confronts art with profound ethical questions. Initially, in the 1980s and 1990s, such questions troubled primarily DJs or studio musicians. But as technology matured, allowing similar acts of assembly in photography and film, these questions became urgent matters of personal and national security. Let us suppose that instead of sampling the sound of an organ, we “sample” the appearance of a particular individual. And instead of assembling the sampled organ sounds into Monteverdi’s *Vespers*, we use an advanced AI algorithm to create a fictitious video of that person committing a criminal act. Such videos—alongside fabricated audio files and text-generating AI engines—are called “deepfakes” and are a source of grave concern for governments, corporations, and intelligence agencies. The dangers of digitally planting words in a person’s mouth or replacing the facial features of a filmed subject include defrauding individuals, inciting communities, manipulating elections, and potentially triggering violent conflicts between nations.[12] The implied conclusion is deeply unsettling: in its pursuit of historical fidelity, the HIP (historically informed performance) movement has adopted methods akin to deepfake technology.
Moreover, in recent years, HIP practitioners have begun experimenting with other technologies from the same family of digital synthesis. For example, Tom Beghin recorded the complete keyboard works of Haydn using historically appropriate instruments—clavichords, harpsichords, and pianos modeled after those of the late eighteenth century. Yet all the instruments were recorded in a sterile acoustic environment, specifically, a studio at McGill University in Montreal. Onto these recordings were artificially “layered” the acoustics of historically appropriate spaces, as sampled by researcher Wieslaw Woszczyk: the music room at Esterházy Palace, Haydn’s study, the ballroom at the Lobkowicz Palace in Vienna, and the Holywell Music Room in Oxford.[13] The “virtual” aspect of the project did not deter musicological critics; on the contrary, it aroused curiosity and appreciation.[14] Why is the use of such advanced technology to falsify acoustic conditions not considered problematic, while only a handful of HIP performers would dare to record themselves multiple times in a multi-track recording? Why is a performance of Monteverdi on a fully digital instrument from the twenty-first century more acceptable than playing Bach on a fortepiano—a technology of the late eighteenth century?
Another technology from this same family, which has not yet gained a foothold in HIP circles, is physical modeling synthesis. Unlike sampling, physical modeling simulates the acoustic behavior of the organ and generates the sound entirely artificially. In theory, physical modeling could allow for the revival of extinct historical instruments, creating “phantoms” of them—artificial reconstructions of their sonic production mechanisms. This technology has not yet fully matured in practice, and it is difficult to argue that it enables HIP musicians to get closer to historical instruments than sampling does. Sampling, after all, is based on digital recording—a technology that has already gained broad legitimacy among historically informed musicians.
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It seems that the boundary between what is acceptable and what is off-limits in the eyes of historically informed performers (HIP) is not entirely consistent—at least not from a purely chronological standpoint. HIP practitioners do not reject new technologies solely because they are new. Rather than focusing on the historical period from which a given technology originates, we should return the discussion to the question of intention. Are we harnessing the best of contemporary technology in order to better understand the past, or are we using it to serve ourselves—and our audiences—in the present? On one hand, it seems that many musicians and listeners will favor the latter, employing whatever means necessary to engage and move themselves and their audiences. On the other hand, a significant number of musicians have embraced the term “historically informed” with the same seriousness with which they have rejected the notion of “authenticity.”
Engagement with the past is not the sole domain of early music specialists. Just as we observed parallels between HIP ideology and DJs’ devotion to vinyl tradition, so too have the samplers become the sampled. Many sampling libraries now offer sounds from the Mellotron of the 1960s—an instrument that has long since attained “classical” status among pop and rock musicians. Today, performers across a range of genres, early music included, continue to grapple with the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and sonic worlds of the past. They too employ every tool at their disposal in pursuit of that goal. To dismiss this pursuit as “museological” or “archival” is to ignore the very real dangers posed by deepfake technologies—while forfeiting the ways in which such tools might, if used carefully, bring us closer—if only slightly—to historical truth.
Footnotes:
The author wishes to thank Yuval Nov, Yuval Shaked, Dan Tidhar, and Sivan Shenhav-Schab for their comments on the draft of this article.
John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 3–50.
It is important to note that the common conventions regarding pitch standard for a′—460Hz, 440Hz, 415Hz, 392Hz—are contemporary constructs. All of them represent approximations of pitch levels found in surviving instruments from the period. In this respect, HIP performers choose to deviate from historical findings in favor of a standardized practice that facilitates integration into today’s professional ensembles.
Dunedin Consort, John Butt (dir.), Monteverdi: Vespers 1610, CD LINN CKD 569 (2017).
Nicholas Thistlethwaite, “Origins and Development of the Organ,” in: Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Organ, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 1–17.
Stephen Bicknell, “Organ Building Today,” in: Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Organ, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 82–92.
Thomas Porcello, “The Ethics of Digital Audio-Sampling: Engineers’ Discourse,” Popular Music 10/1 (1991): 69–84, esp. 69.
Ibid., pp. 70–76.
In fact, Hohner’s Cembalet and Clavinet were intended to be electromechanical versions of the historical harpsichord and clavichord, respectively, but they were created before the ideology of “authentic instruments” became the dominant paradigm among early music performers. In the end, both instruments became widely used in popular music rather than in the performance of early music.
Ed Montano, “‘How do you know he’s not playing Pac-Man while he's supposed to be DJing?’: Technology, Formats and the Digital Future of DJ Culture,” Popular Music 29/3 (2010): 397–416.
Booklet to Dunedin Consort, Monteverdi: Vespers, p. 18.
Hannah Smith and Katherine Mansted, Weaponised Deep Fakes: National Security and Democracy, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2000.
Tom Beghin, The Virtual Haydn: Complete Works for Solo Keyboard, CD Naxos 8.501203 (2011).
John Irving, “Digital Approaches to Haydn's Solo Keyboard Music,” Early Music 40/3 (2012): 535–8; Deborah Howard, “Review: The Virtual Haydn: Complete Works for Solo Keyboard by Tom Beghin, Martha de Francisco, Wieslaw Woszczyk, et al.,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68/2 (Summer 2015): 465–75.