Historic accuracy blah blah blah

My dear fellow music enthusiasts, the time has come to at least murmur a bit about historical accuracy. Conversations on this topic almost always take an unpleasant turn, I must warn you. So please keep your scathing comments to a respectful minimum. When talking about historical accuracy in music, one usually refers to music from the Baroque or Classical eras, before composers were meticulous about notating everything. I'll give you an example of one very famous (in nerdly circles) debate: how many people sang in JS Bach's ensemble? Seems like an easy question, right? If you only knew the scads of essays, angry letters and other pretentious treatises written on the subject. The main scholars in this debate are Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott, both well-respected as musicians and historians. Rifkin says Bach's vocal music should be performed with one singer per part. He also claims that the St. Matthew Passion was originally performed with this complement. The debate exists because actual evidence regarding first "performances" (this is back when sacred music was written for actual sacred services) and personnel lists for St. Thomas, where Bach worked, is sparse and inconsistent. Still, Rifkin and Parrott go around and around on this topic. Granted, it is a noble pursuit to try to discover as much about the music as possible in order to give a thoughtful, respectful performance. But the way I see it, after having read ever so many Rifkin/Parrott essays that grew more and more adolescent in their personal attacks, the whole subject comes down to one question in the end.



Should this piece be performed the way it was originally performed or the way it was intended to be performed by the composer?



This question isn't meant to over simplify the situation at all. After all, how can we always know how a piece was meant to be performed? Still, the question is valid, I think. For the sake of consistency, let's consider Bach. He did not have many musicians at his disposal most of the time. At St. Thomas, he did have a boys choir he got to train, which I'm sure was very useful. Perhaps Bach could only find one good singer to represent each vocal part...does that mean we should perform it as such these days? Anyone who has studied Bach from a performance perspective knows how important textural clarity is to Bach so maybe the Mormon Tabernacle Choir wouldn't be appropriate for a performance of Komm, Jesu, Komm. But couldn't one use a 16-voice ensemble? This is a lot to think about and opinions are constantly changing. It's a bit hard to keep up, really, with all of the scholarly debate.



What do you think? How would you answer the question?