A violin by Jacob Steiner, 1658

As in any walk of life, the technology of musical instruments has evolved with time, composers have exploited the new capabilities, techniques have evolved, and so sounds have changed and grown, pitch has risen, and musical styles, performance and taste have changed. And of course, older techniques and sounds have been lost and forgotten.

In our upcoming concert Baroque classics on June 29 we are collaborating, for the first time, with an ensemble that uses Period instruments and uses techniques and playing styles informed by historical research: Manchester Baroque.

So what is all the fuss about ? Here’s a brief explainer.

What are ‘Period instruments’ ?

Period instruments are musical instruments that date from about the time of the music that is being played and are set up in the way scholars think would have been the case at that time. For instruments from the Baroque period (1600-1750) this includes playing at a slightly lower pitch than is standard today.

String instruments such as violins are setup with gut strings rather than the modern ones that are wound in metal, and are bowed with bows of a different shape and tension from modern bows. The result is usually that the sound they make is softer, both in volume and timbre.

The difference in the bows forces the players to rethink how they use the bows to create musical phrases, usually resulting in shorter phrases and a greater degree of articulation, which both serve to make the music more interesting.

Wind instruments, particularly woodwind (oboes, bassoons and flutes) also tend to be softer, with the flutes made of wood, while brass instruments, being made without modern techniques that favour blend and uniformity, and in some cases without modern valve systems, are sometimes more characterful and quirky in their sound – as well as being harder to play.

This all allows some sounds and parts of the musical texture to be heard in a way that isn’t possible with modern instruments, leading a number of conductors and groups specialising in music from periods such as the Baroque period to to discover how the music would have sounded to the composers who wrote it and in particular what the composer’s intentions may have been.

Further reading:

Baroque violin

How I play both Baroque and modern violin

What is ‘historically-informed performance’?

‘Historically-informed performance’ is a term that is used to describe musical performance which combines the use of period instruments with technical and stylistic knowledge gleaned from academic research to produce musical performances that are as close to the intention and maybe the experience of the composer as we can make them.

The quest for historically-informed performance began in the later years of the twentieth century, being initially termed ‘authentic’ performance. However, as the quest developed and matured, its practitioners became more aware of the impossibility of genuinely authentic performance practice and adopted the term ‘historically-informed’ instead.

Historical information about musical performance is obtained by scrutinising original manuscripts, period instruments, treatises on style and technique, images, reports of concerts and any other available resource. It is then tested and validated in practice to determine what seems to work musically and physically.

So for example the precise way to execute the various types of ornament (extra decorative notes implied by a single musical symbol) in a particular region and period may be informed by a relevant document.

On the other hand, agreement that most Baroque music was played about a semitone lower (A=415Hz) than today’s standard concert pitch (A=440Hz) is based mainly on the physics of period instruments and the ease or otherwise with which vocal music by the likes of Bach and Handel fit the human voice.

It is of course impossible to really know exactly how music of times past would have sounded, and it is important to be clear that much historically-informed performance has also been shaped by experimentation, judgment and preference of experienced musicians, and to a degree, audiences.

The thrilling sounds of the modern professional Monteverdi Choir for instance, even with the elimination of vocal vibrato, are unlikely to be true to the sounds that would have been made by the relatively undernourished children and teenagers of Bach’s choirs in Leipzig, let alone the much smaller vocal ensembles that probably delivered the first performances of his St John and St Matthew Passions.

To an extent, this is a compromise required by modern concert hall performances, but also by taste, with the historically-informed styling combined with the sounds of the period instruments delivering truly thrilling music-making for the modern ear, and which the composers may have dreamt of, but possibly not really experienced.