The ethnologist Owe Ronström wrote, ‘there are revivals not because there has been a past, but because there is a future to come’.Footnote ¹ This futurity, I argue, is what characterises an emergent vanguard of the ‘historically informed performance’ (HIP) movement in the twenty-first century. Broadly speaking, of course, the popularisation and proliferation of HIP in the twentieth century led, as Tamara Livingston notes, to the ‘end of the revival as an oppositional, anti-establishment “movement” and its transformation into an accepted current in the musical mainstream’.Footnote ² Assimilation invariably diminishes something of the potentiality of the assimilated. However, I argue that HIP (like any scene) was more rhizomatic and multifaceted (and therefore robust) than this broad ‘outsider-to-accepted-current’ trajectory allows. Indeed, twentieth-century period-instrument pioneers from Frans Brüggen to Elisabeth Chojnacka evidence a vibrant experimentalism within, and beyond, the mainstream. As with many of those pioneering instrumentalists, the focus of the twenty-first-century scene I describe is new music written for, and performed on, historical instruments. This article, then, is an attempt to delineate something of this scene, which I call ‘post-HIP’.Footnote ³ I use this term not so much as nomenclature, but for its denoting both a turn away from history as primary instigator, and the scene's relation to broader ‘post-revival’ movements in which, as Caroline Hill and Juniper Bithell note, ‘spin-off traditions… break free from the restrictions imposed by the purist arm of the revival and develop practices more apropos to their own contemporary reality’.Footnote ⁴

What follows is a discussion centred around the work of the lutenist Jozef van Wissem, gambist Liam Byrne and baroque violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir (along with her ensemble Nordic Affect). Drawing on musicological and journalistic writing, my own interviews with these artists (and others)Footnote ⁵ and my experiences as a composer working in the field, this discussion will seek to understand both what characterises ‘post-HIP’ and in what ways ‘post-HIP’ might be considered the corollary to earlier revivalist practice and ideology. Further, I aim to situate ‘post-HIP’ within wider pop and non-classical frameworks, drawing – in particular – on notions of ‘retromania’, post-internet and post-postmodernist practice.

The lutenist Jozef van Wissem describes his compositional approach as ‘medieval sampling’.Footnote ⁶ New music emerges from, and in dialogue with, the lute's historical repertoire; he notes, ‘I just play music for a while and listen to classical pieces, and then there's a theme that sort of stands out for me’.Footnote ⁷ This approach, I argue (borrowing from John Butt),Footnote ⁸ is an example of David Lowenthal's concept of ‘heritage’, as distinct from ‘history’. Where history belongs to the past (‘inaccessibly alien’),Footnote ⁹ heritage is active within, and upon, the present, uninhibited by history's need for objective ‘truth’; ‘heritage is sanctioned not by proof of origins but by present exploits… The worth of heritage is… gauged not by critical tests but by current potency’.Footnote ¹⁰ As heritage, van Wissem's ‘medieval sampling’ blurs the boundary between interpretation and composition, imposing twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance (and listening) practice on to historical repertoire both as a means of revivification of the historical, and as generative.Footnote ¹¹ Citing his interpretation of the Renaissance song ‘You Know I Love You and Adore You’,Footnote ¹² for example, van Wissem notes, ‘they asked me to perform it in just a standard classical way, but sometimes it doesn't really come across very good if you do that to an audience, if there's a big audience, so I sort of make a drone out of it – put an open string under it, under the melody, so it becomes a bit more stronger [sic] and a bit more – I would say – more of a live experience’.Footnote ¹³ Van Wissem's approach challenges ideas of authorship and the immutable historical (canonical) work and is therefore clearly counter to much mainstream concert music performance practice, which is based, still, in the Werktreue ideal.Footnote ¹⁴

This, then, is a defining characteristic of ‘post-HIP’: a deconstruction and re-assemblage of the historical within the generative, liminal space of ‘heritage’. Applied to instrumentation as well as repertoire, this approach is more broadly freeing; van Wissem is ‘not only liberating the lute… but also asking his audience to liberate themselves from accustomed approaches to music’.Footnote ¹⁵ Elsewhere, the Canadian composer Sarah Davachi notes, ‘I think there's this taboo of “oh, you can't record a harpsichord and then cut it up and do things with it”; of course, you can. You can do whatever you want. If it sounds good, why wouldn't you do it?’.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, I argue it is historical instruments’ discontinuity of practice that facilitates a creative freedom beyond that of their ‘mainstream’ counterparts. The composer and hurdy-gurdy player Stevie Wishart notes, for example:

While van Wissem's compositional technique is based in the pre-classical repertoire, his aesthetic is rooted firmly in plural twentieth- and twenty-first-century traditions. His use of drones and distortion, and the lute's association with the guitar (no matter how spurious), situate his music in the realm of ‘rock’ (as does his appearance – the journalist Steve Dollar notes that he ‘could easily pass for a Nordic metal overlord, with thigh-high black leather boots and long, dirty-blond hair’Footnote ¹⁸). The focused, sparing repetition of his material, however, is perhaps closer to the minimalism of his fellow Hollanders, Louis Andriessen and Simeon ten Holt. Where van Wissem uses electronics, the ‘retro’, analogue and granular are emphasised.Footnote ¹⁹ All in all, an eclectic, pluralistic approach emerges. Indeed, this eclecticism and stylistic plurality (working ‘post-genre’) is, I argue, a further defining characteristic of ‘post-HIP’ and situates the scene within a wider twenty-first-century cultural shift.

Here, I draw on ideas in Simon Reynolds’ Retromania. Reynolds’ argument, broadly put, is that the ubiquity of the internet in the new millennium, and in particular what he calls the ‘crisis of overdocumentation triggered by digital technology’ (YouTube, he says, ‘serves as both major player and potent symbol’),Footnote ²⁰ has engendered a saturated state of referentiality and, consequently, a dearth of originality in pop music. He writes, ‘the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present's own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel’.Footnote ²¹ While Reynolds undoubtedly identifies a profound cultural shift, I am inclined to agree with Michael Waugh, who refutes Reynolds’ pejorative diagnosis, suggesting instead that what Reynolds laments is the destabilisation of hegemonic systems (including the role of the critic) associated with ‘the progressive linearity of the canonical historiography of popular music’.Footnote ²² Post-internet cultural production is, in other words, unoriginal only when applying a rather outmoded Whig-historiographical reading, one that preserves old divisions and hierarchies and misunderstands (or simply does not recognise) the centrality of the network in ‘post-internet’ art.Footnote ²³ Reynolds’ focus is pop music, but I argue that ‘post-HIP’ artists also engage with ‘retromania’, both by virtue of their living in the (inescapably) ‘post-internet’ era and because their instruments demand it, at once overtly signifying their historicity and, because of those instruments’ aforementioned discontinuity of practice, affording negation of it. We could go further: the predominance of retromania in pop suggests that revival, as productive mode, has permeated the wider culture, a symptom, perhaps, of a shift originating in postmodernism that has, in the post-internet twenty-first century, transcended it to become what has variously been called ‘post-postmodernism’, ‘post-irony’ or ‘new sincerity’.Footnote ²⁴ While this is undoubtedly a vast topic, beyond the scope of the current article, considering ‘post-HIP’ in this context is, I believe, central to an understanding of the scene.

Whereas postmodernismFootnote ²⁵ facilitated a levelling of the cultural landscape, negating modernism's hierarchies, post-postmodernism (as I use the term here, in the context of Reynolds’ ‘simultaneity of pop time’) utilises diverse reference points both as resource (anything, still, is available) and as signifiers of their referentiality. The cultural critic Steven Shaviro explains:

‘Post-HIP’ engages with this ‘multifaceted immanence’ in numerous ways. Van Wissem's stylistic plurality, for example, engages a listener attuned both to the signifiers of the genres he samples and the mode of sampling itself. When the vocalist and composer Marianne Schuppe resonates her lute using an electric guitar EBow, she treats the instrument ahistorically (outside its playing tradition, already re-constructed) and, in doing so, signposts the historicity she negates.Footnote ²⁷ By ‘hacking’ a harpsichord for her Orpheus Machines project,Footnote ²⁸ Patricia Alessandrini reconfigures manifold associations and expectations around both the harpsichord (in particular) and the category of ‘instrument’ (more broadly) in the digital age.Footnote ²⁹ In Dual Synthesis, Tristan Perich melds the harpsichord's timbral ‘flatness’ with ‘1-bit electronics’ (‘every value is either zero or one. There is no volume control, there's no timbral adjustment’Footnote ³⁰); consequently, the homogeneity of harpsichord–computer sound contains the collapsed totality of Dual Synthesis’ reference points – eighteenth-century repertoire, American minimalism, consumer electronics and so on.Footnote ³¹ Unlike in postmodernism, however, references and referentiality are here played with unironically, not a negation of the absolutes of modernism but a sincere reaction against (or perhaps, more accurately, an extension of) postmodernism as the dominant cultural mode. In ‘post-HIP’, this is inescapable; put plainly – using an historical instrument (to perform new music) in the twenty-first century almost invariably involves utilising the referentiality with which it is inexorably bound.

Engagement with the ecology of the performance space is another defining characteristic of ‘post-HIP’. Thought of within the post-postmodernist framework, alternative performance spaces mediate their meanings within broader referential networks, including in relation to that which they negate; a carpark-within-which-an-orchestra-plays is now not only a carpark but also not-a-concert-hall.Footnote ³² Liam Byrne's 2015 performance series for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Inside Voices,Footnote ³³ is a useful example of this, particularly as concerns the importance of the viol's historicity in activating these meanings. Consisting of more than 300 one-to-one performances inside a Victorian plaster-cast column, the series, according to Byrne, is a ‘kind of Marina Abramović knock-off viola da gamba installation’.Footnote ³⁴ For Byrne, the column's interior was the nexus for plural meanings, not only in relation to performance-art traditions, but also the viol's historical contexts and the live musical experience more broadly – what Christopher Small formulated as ‘musicking’: music as verb (something done between people) rather than noun (as in the mainstream classical tradition).Footnote ³⁵ Byrne explains, ‘in the baroque period, live music happened in a varied assortment of domestic, institutional, public and private spaces. Nowadays, baroque music is performed almost exclusively in concert halls, which creates a rather one-way relationship between musicians and their audiences’.Footnote ³⁶ The viol is crucial in accessing these meanings, activating a kind of criticality in its unbelonging: it is an outsider and therefore apt to facilitate interrogation of both space and related performance traditions. Byrne notes that:

Elsewhere, the baroque violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir explores space through her ‘ecological sound art’ pieces in which the listening experience of one space is activated within another.Footnote ³⁸ She notes, ‘we are wired to listen in a very different way to the world, and it's about bringing those abilities into different environments and seeing what that will reveal’.Footnote ³⁹ Stefánsdóttir's 2017 installation at the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík, I Play Northern Lights, for example, formed ‘a critique of classical concert hall culture… [and] the emergence of a concert tradition that diminishes the possibilities for participation’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Stefánsdóttir, like Byrne, challenges the one-way relationship between listener and musician in the concert hall,Footnote ⁴¹ using installation and movement to ‘reveal the elephant in the room which is the space itself’.Footnote ⁴²

Of course, since the mid-2000s performance of classical music outside the concert hall has become increasingly commonplace. Thom Andrewes notes that non-classicalFootnote ⁴³ performance methodologies ‘[unsettle] both the music and the space, restoring to that music some of its most attractive difficulty’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The institutionalised performance space, by contrast, stifles its repertoire: ‘closeted away in a university or recital room, there can be a sense that this music is neutralised, always already included in a discourse of sounds and pitches, rather than fore-grounding its challenge to the world’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Here, non-classical and post-internet practices align, post-internet art also emphasising a ‘shift against the hermeticism of the art world’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In engaging with these trends, ‘post-HIP’ artists are not only participating in a wider cultural shift but responding to something fundamental about their instruments. Having been revived, historical instruments are inexorably bound up with institutions of history (museums, conservatoires and so on).Footnote ⁴⁷ ‘Post-HIP’ artists must therefore challenge the institutional space in order to resonate meaningfully in the contemporary world – as van Wissem notes, ‘you want to remove the dust!’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Further, some residue of the original revivalists’ outsider status remains;Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘post-HIP’ practice is therefore both anti-institutional and institutionalised, a paradox that demands engagement with the classical/non-classical dichotomy.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of historical instruments, and certainly the creative impetus for much of the ‘post-HIP’ practice I have described, is their timbre, which tends to be granular and analogue, and which mediates something of the instrument's physicality, its having been made and handled. Davachi notes, ‘they retain this sort of instability… especially the older back you go’;Footnote ⁵⁰ Stefánsdóttir describes the baroque violin as having ‘a certain graininess to it’;Footnote ⁵¹ Wishart says of the medieval violin, ‘the gut strings have this hidden timbral quality’.Footnote ⁵² Implicit, perhaps, in this focus on timbre is a negation of harmonic drive. Certainly, harmonic stasis is common to the ‘post-HIP’ aesthetic. Anna Þorvaldsdóttir's Shades of Silence, for example (written for Nordic Affect in 2012), ‘begins with droning strings and with barely audible sounds produced by plucking, brushing, and rubbing the strings of a harpsichord. Eventually, chiming figures emerge from the cloud of timbre’.Footnote ⁵³ Wishart's Out of the Mists, for harpsichord and piano, similarly explores ‘timbre in its own right’; she explains, ‘so often I'll really simplify music… because then you can just hear timbre’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Relatedly, recording technology is central to ‘post-HIP’ practice insofar as the microphone facilitates a different listening experience, magnifying or affording transformation of these timbral qualities.Footnote ⁵⁵ Stefánsdóttir's collaboration with the composer Mirjam Tally, In the Bottomless Hollow of the Winter Sky, was, for example, ‘a process of field recording the [baroque] violin’, approached as one might a landscape, in order to capture the idiosyncrasies of its sound.Footnote ⁵⁶ In making their album Raindamage (‘an exploration of the studio environment and the collaborative possibilities’ therein), Nordic Affect were always careful to ensure that the ‘graininess [was] let through’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Valgeir Sigurðsson encouraged Byrne to ‘explore the extremes of [his] instrument's tonal palette’ when making Dissonance,Footnote ⁵⁸ sounds which were then ‘sculpted… and curated’Footnote ⁵⁹ in the studio, ‘routing the signals back out to amps, speakers and effects before recording the entire thing back to tape’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Electronic composition and studio techniques allow for a direct handleability of sound. For the percussionist and writer Chris Cutler, the studio therefore offers a way back to what he calls the ‘folk form’, which favours the primacy of sound, a collectivised aesthetic, resistance to the ‘definitive’ work and a synthesis of the roles of composer and performer. This aligns entirely with the definition of ‘post-HIP’ I have begun to trace. By contrast, notation (and by extension mainstream classical music-making) has engendered a paradigm in which

This leads me to my conclusion: ‘post-HIP’ is a political imperative in the twenty-first century. In his book Post-Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, Jeffrey Nealon attempts a ‘periodization’ of our current epoch just as Frederic Jameson ‘periodized’ the 1960s,Footnote ⁶² framing it using broad cultural trends rather than calendar years. The 1980s, Nealon argues, ended on 11 September 2001. Gone, in our present, is the optimism of Jameson's ‘late capitalism’, replaced by neoliberal ‘“new economies” (post-Fordism… and their complex relations to cultural production’.Footnote ⁶³ Consequently, Nealon argues, ‘the cultural rebellion narratives of the ‘60s… can now officially be pronounced dead’.Footnote ⁶⁴

In this context, ‘post-HIP’ is vital insofar as it mediates something of heritage, the analogue, the intersubjective and the emancipatory. In enacting history in the present as heritage, historical instruments dismantle and repurpose something of their associated cultural hegemony; their timbral instability is imbued with a sense of physicality, engendering liveness and in-the-moment musicking; their Otherness to mainstream classical traditions (no matter how diminished in the wake of assimilation) affords stylistic plurality and a challenging of the ecology of the concert hall; alignment with post-genre and non-classical scenes, as well as a broader post-postmodernist turn, punctures something of the hermeticism of the classical music world. Finally, in existing within what Nick Prior calls our ‘hypermodern moment’, in which the digital helps ‘loosen, soften and make malleable contemporary social, cultural and economic forms… [changing] our expectations about what belongs in music, what music consists of, who is making music and how’,Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘post-HIP’ is able to utilise creative technologies for their liberalising effects. In short, ‘post-HIP’ is uniquely placed to build Ronström's ‘future to come’.