Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy, for the most part Hurwitz's reviews of Mahler, Shostakovich, Beethoven, the underrated Nielsen, and Martinu, you name it on YouTube. That said, he is not the only reviewer I read. I tend to be as catholic in the reviewers I read just as I am in the various type of performances I listen to and frankly enjoy. What I have grown increasingly weary of, however, is Hurwitz's seemingly never ending obsession--that is what auteurists would call it--with the presumed evils--historical (the omnipresent mention of vibrato), ethical, moral, aesthetic, etc.--of Historically Informed Performance or HIP, performance practises that began to emerge after the 1970s. Increasingly, in the face of Hurwitz's almost constant jeremiads on the deviltries of HIP, I have come to think of him as the high priest of a cult and his obsessions as at the heart of a cultic religion constructed around the evil of some profane phenomenon, in this case the aforementioned unhip HIP.
Hurwitz's priestly rants against HIP reached a fever pitch recently with his YouTube video entitled "Music Chat: Period Performance is Killing the Classics". In that talk Hurwitz seemed to assert that one of the reasons if not the major reason for the decline of contemporary classical music is the cookie cutter idiocies of the HIP crowd. Putting aside the issue of whether the classical music industry is in decline or whether the action has shifted from the once Big Boy godfathers of the industry to companies like Naxos, which also distributes a bevy of smaller labels, and BIS, to choose two of many increasingly significant players in the classical music industry, and putting aside the health of digital media like Naxos Radio, I found myself puzzled by what seemed to me Hurwitz's rather reductive argument.
I was taken aback because generally speaking, in my experience and in my research, I learned that one can easily recognise the fact that a variety of factors influence everything and everyone including the classical music industry. There's economics, for instance. With respect to the classical music industry, the music industry, the media, and corporations, all of these have been impacted by, whatever you want to call it--I will call it neo-liberalism or revitalised laissez-faire liberalism with its dogma that the market is rational--an empirically ludicrous notion--and always right--an even more vacuum packed empirically ludicrous notion--and neo-liberal corporate oriented globalisation (a globalisation that allows corporations and monies free movement but not labour). There's politics. Political bureaucracies, dominated as they are by neo-liberal ideologies and economic elites, have allowed the theology of neo-liberalism to become uncritical dogma in their minds and they bow before it and give obeisance to it as if it was a sacred rite and a holy god. There's demographics. With regard to the classical music industry, we might want to ask whether there demographic shifts going on in classical music listening? How have these intersected with important cultural factors such as class? race? gender? status? cultural capital? social capital? the rise of moronic dumbed down populist elitism and give rich people their freedom populist movements? There's geography. Here we might want to think about the issue of whether geographical patterns of classical music listening and practise have shifted. Are there variations in these across space? Then there is the big one, culture. Here we might want to reflect upon whether performance practises have previously changed across space and time before and whether they will they continue to do so in the future given the nature of consumerism, public relations, and advertising propaganda. Is the cult of the fad of the moment built into consumer capitalism? Is the neoliberal media in general dominated by a cookie cutter formulaic approach (see Hollywood paint by the genre numbers "adolescent" blockbusters with their mania for anti-realism and anti-naturalism) for economic reasons and is that what the masses really want (bread and circuses)? If it is, isn't it thus silly to blame HIP, a mirror and reflection (a dependent variable) rather than a cause (independent variable), for the current status of the classical music industry? And what about the socialised eyes of the beholder?
Anyway, all of this is a short way of saying I prefer multifactorial approaches which recognise that economics, politics, culture, demography, and geography all impact human life, including the classical music industry and its bureaucracies and practises, to those that are more reductive and reductionist. I have to admit, however, that I have increasingly grown not to expect little more than Spanish inquisitions from the many cults of the emotionally fevered poison minds out there in the normative determines descriptive, political and ideological correctness determines reality, lalaland. Let me end this post by noting that I didn't expect a kind of Spanish inquisition, one milder in form to be sure, from the clearly intelligent, knowledgeable, learned, and studied David Hurwitz's of the world. But I think that is what I got.
One further note before I go: Hurwitz is yet another one of those blokes who whinges and whines about wokeness and cancel culture while engaging in both regularly. He apparently is on a mission from god to awaken those who use social media about the historical mistakes of historically informed practise (vibrato) and he censors posts on his site that critique or add to his politically and ideologically correct rants, itself a long historically informed practise.
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