Does the instrument really matter?

The case for (and against) historical flutes

Byjed Wentz

y first and only experience of an interactive live radio broadcast occurred several years ago when I performed a programme of Bach sonatas in the BBC's 'Escape to Bach' marathon. The gimmick went like this: listeners were encouraged to have their say online, for all the world to see, while the performance was still under way. I was, therefore, oblivious to the reviews my playing was getting until after the show was over. Wlien I later went online to see what the tone of the commentary had been, I was shocked at how violently negative the reactions were, not so much to my interpretation as such, but rather, to the fact that these pieces were being played on aflaulotraverso and not a flute. All at once, after nearly twenty years spent comfortably cradled in the 'authentic' niche in which I perform, I was rudely awakened from my dream of acceptance and tolerance among my fellow flute players. To put it in a nutshell: I fonnd it incredible, but irrefutable, that my choice of instrument was still very much an issue. The alarm-bells, once sounded, jnst kept ringing in my brain. I realized, through their din, that it is high time we traverso-players face the music, or at least wake up from our Rococo reveries and smell the cciffee! Clearly, now that so many years have passed since the early instrument revival took wing in the 1960s, it is relevant once again to address the issue of which flute, but this time with a critical eye to the early music movements development, its ideologies, and their validity in the twenty-first century. Perhaps any lingering antagonism between modern and early flute players has to do with the moral argument that was wielded in such an overbearing manner hy advocates of early instruments in the 1980s and early 1990s. Following this line of thought-which holds chat getting closer to what the composer Intended his music to sound like is morally superior to attempting to update it to current aesthetic standardscould of course lead to an exclusionist stance towards performance: if it is morally better to play Bach on the traverso, one must conclude thai it is somehow immoral to play him on anything else. This I hold to be utter nonsense. The performance of music is not a moral questionat least not between performer and composer! We cannot know what a dead composer would have thought of our performances of his music on any instrument, modern or historical, and it is highly presumptuous for any musician to claim intimate knowledge of a composer's taste in such matters. It seems to me. in fact, that the moral obligationif there be oneis actually between performer and audience: the performer of early music who plays on a period instrument and claims to have based his performance on historical sources.
www.bfs.urq.uk

Jed Wentz studied modern and historical flutes at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and received a Soloist's Dipioma from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, after studying v\/ith Barthold Kuijken. He performed for many years with Msica Antiqua Kln. In 1992 he founded Msica ad Rhenum, with whom he works as flute player and conductor.Jed teaches at the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music and is pursuing his doctorate through Leiden University, his research centring on the tragdie en musique.

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but who ignores any particular information from said sources that he dishkes {such as those nasty and virtuosic metronomic indications which would require him to practise just that httle bit harder) is, in my opinion, more immoral by far than the Boehm fluteplayer who unpretentiously and unashamedly presents Bach the way he or she likes it. Since we can neither please nor disappoint a deceased composer, our priority is to make clear just what it is we are dishing up to our paying public, and to dehver the promised goods to the best of our ability. For both the traverso player and the modern flute player this demands integrity, rigour and a crystalline clarity of intentions. But if I drop the argument for historically-informed performances based on moral imperatives, if indeed I no longer feel myself to be bound by any obligation to dead composers to pick up a wooden rather than a silver flute when performing Baroque music, then why for the love of Pete do I do it? Why struggle with out-of-tune, weak, recalcitrant instruments, with bizarrelytuned harpsichord temperaments. with clumsy cross-fingerings and with all the rag-and-bones of centuries gone by? For me there is only one answer, and it is a selfish one: because 1 like it. As noble as altruism is in a social context, it has no place in the world of the performing arts. I like, indeed love the traverso, its sound, and especially, the intensity of the contact between player and instrument. Historical flutes are like spoilt, whimsical lovers: they demand the world of you, but when you give them what they wantheaven! They reward with colours and sounds you never dreamed possible. They draw you into intense physical contact with the sound you are producing; they make you work so hard at producing it that when it finally succeeds the joy is intoxicating. This is the real reward for the early flute player's struggles. It is not an abstract, selfless love of a dead composer I have never met which motivates me, but a greedy, selfish love of the feding of performing on a wooden flute. And the pleasure this gives me is all the justification I need for having dedicated my professional life to performing on historical instruments. As long as the early musician can sell concerts, as long as there is an audience ready to share this struggle with the musical and performative material as well as able to enjoy its aural results, he or she has earned the right to play on such instruments in public.
December 2008

Jean-Antoine Watteau's L'Accord parfait, engraved abou 1720 by Bernard Baron. Note that the engraving is the reverse of the original painting, which is reproduced on the cover of this issue, (Private collection,}

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Flutes old and new. Right: An eighteenth-century flute by Thomas Lot, Paris. (Photograph by Peter Spohr.) Top: A flute by Theobald Boehm, Munich, 1851. (Photograph by Peter Spohr.) Above: Eva Kingma's quarter-tone flute. (Photograph courtesy of Eva Kingma.)

Having said this, I must admit that I do think that performing an ancient piece on the instruments in fashion at the time of its conception automatically elucidates certain aspects ofthat piece, and I feel sure that these specific flashes of insight are less likely to happen when performing on more even-tempered instruments. For instance, in preparing my recent recording of the A major quartet from Telemann s Qudri of 1730 I was struck by the stressed tonal qualities of all of the instruments as they struggled for perfection in the passages that modulate to C sharp major, a key in which the harpsichord's temperament is more 'colourful' than comfortable, and in which the traverso is both unhappy and unstable in terms of tuning and tone. This chromatic discomfort gave a heightened rhetorical tension to the passage; the extra sweat and tears of the performers in the difficult spots resulted in a corresponding relaxation of tension when the music returned to the relative simplicity of A major a few bars later. Such effects brought out by the instruments themselves are by no means limited to this particular score: the inequality of the traversos tone colour and dynamic range as it moves from key to key must result in a colourful perception of the structure of any given piece. Taken together, such 'problems' create differentiated, unequal readings that are different from, but just as aesthetically valid as, performances on modern instruments. I finish my apology for tolerance and against exciusionism among flute players by stressing the right that both instruments have to existence. As long as someone wants to play while another wants to listen there is a right for performers to perform. For modern players, intimidated by the moral arguments of the eighties and nineties, to try to imitate the traverso by producing an unhealthy sound on their own instrument would be as foolish as a traverso player's striving, cowed by the perfection possible on the modern flute, to achieve the equality that his instrument by nature denies him. And so I would propose to my colleagues, both modern and ancient, to stop expecting to hear one flute while listening to the other: a traverso will not be equal, but it will be colourful. A Boehm flute will be equal, but it will also be full, forceful, singing and smooth. We do not 'improve' either by making it imitate the other. Therefore, let each instrument unashamedly be what it will. Mastery of each is equally difficult to attain: and it is this very struggle for mastery, the travail of a muse pregnant with art, which demands our mutual respect.
www.bfs.org.uk