Article Summary: What Would Handel Do?

Writing Assignment 1 According to the article, “What would Handel do? Historically informed performance, then and now” written by Matthew Lynch, Lynch states that HIP or Historical informed performance was established by Arnold Dolmetsch, who built, published, and worked with music which extends back into the late 19th century. Lynch mentions that HIP movement was developed as people wanted to rediscover, learn the technique, play (on the original instruments) and listen to old music. However, he also states that there were critics alongside with the development of HIP. Most critics were based on authenticity, as most specialists could not truly reflect the true purposes of the composers to the performers, then this led to the performance …show more content…
Cook mentions, “there are aspects of the music about which the notation is silent” (p. 53) With this statement, it means in order to perform a music, we are not only focusing on the notation, but also focusing on other things such as how loud, or how soft should it be as well. This can be related to the argument about HIP, as HIP is not about playing the notes of the early music, but also we should consider what intentions do the composer had at that moment, what technique shall be used, and what instruments were used in that period of time. By the statement, “Notation conserves music, then, but it conceals as much as it reveals,” (p. 59) it exemplifies that we may know or at least have an idea of what early music sounds like based on its notation. Given this point, we can say that notation conserves music. However, we hardly know what the exact early sounds like, since notation cannot tell us everything about a piece of music, for instance, it cannot tell us what kind of voice should we use to sing this, or how people in the early period sang it, and what exactly kind of instruments they used to perform. Therefore, notation conceals music as