EDITORIAL

Abstract

In the world of historically informed performance (HIP) the word ‘authenticity’ is, if not exactly dead, certainly taboo (‘I know that we shouldn't use the A-word’), fenced in with qualifiers (‘Of course we can't be fully authentic’) or softened to clarify that of course HIP performances are aiming for something less than a full realization of the composer's intentions (‘This may be the way Mozart could have heard it’, or ‘This represents some of the practices of the time’). But at least for the most successful practitioners of HIP (epigones may be a different matter), authenticity discourse was always a significant but simplified version of one part of a more complex and even contradictory set of justifications for using old instruments and techniques. Indeed, HIP practitioners regularly invoke chapter and verse from the treatises or other primary sources in the same breath as claiming not to be interested in authenticity per se or not to be engaged in any kind of ‘reconstruction’. This discursive rupture may be more striking with music of the later seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the performance-practice sources are more numerous and the scores are more ‘complete’ by modern standards than those of much earlier music, whose performance has always been more frankly imaginative and conjectural.