Carl Baermann (1811-1885) was a clarinettist working in Munich in the mid-19th century. He is the son of the famous clarinettist Heinrich Baermann, with whom Carl Maria von Weber collaborated on most of his compositions for clarinet. Carl Baermann studied and performed with his father, and became principal clarinet in the Munich Hofkapelle, now the Bayerisches Staatsoper, where he performed the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Baermann is an important figure in the development of the clarinet and clarinet playing. He co-designed the Baermann-Ottensteiner clarinet, which is the basis of the modern German-system clarinet, and his Vollstandige Clarinett-Schule (1860) and his editions of core clarinet repertoire have remained in constant use since their publication. 

The title of the project – ‘Baermann’s Body’ – refers not just to his physical body and the way he used it to make music, but to the whole body of artefacts he left behind: his instrument design, teaching method, compositions, editions, letters and other documents. We can think of these as the surviving physical traces of his musical life – the marks left behind on the world as his physical body moved through it. The project case study will re-aminate some of these artefacts to better understand Baermann and his musical world.

‘Embodiment’ is a term used in many academic disciplines in different ways. In this context, I am using it to refer to the way that musicians use their bodies to explore historical musical practices and historical sources – literally ‘embodying’ the actions, gestures, sound-worlds and expressive languages that were used in the past, in specific times and places and sometimes by particular people. Embodiment can be a form of re-enactment, but it often goes beyond that, as we seek to grasp the motivations, feelings, and musical understanding that lay behind the bare instructions and descriptions that remain in texts and musical scores.

Historically Informed Performance, or HIP, is one of various names for a whole cluster of methods that musicians can use to get closer to the original performing conditions, practices, and styles of the past. Some examples of this are using period instruments; exploring the advice of historical treatises on matters of style such as phrasing, ornamentation, and articulation; using original performing materials or critical editions that clarify what information the composer did, and didn’t, give their musicians; analysing and copying historical sound recordings of musicians trained in the 19th century; and studying historical performers’ editions to fill the gaps in our knowledge between the composers’ notation and how musicians actually brought it to life.

The point of HIP is not to establish a ‘correct’ or ‘authentic’ interpretation, nor to claim that we can exactly re-create the way that music was sounded or experienced in the past. Like all research, historical and otherwise, it involves trial and error, guesswork, and imagination to fill the gaps in the evidence. HIP is about going on a journey to better understand the working conditions and musical landscape our historical ‘colleagues’ were dealing with. It is about challenging our assumptions about the past – and the present. It’s about dismantling the misleading certainty and simplicity of musical notation to reveal the messy artistic process that lies behind it, and in doing so, opening up a whole new toolkit of creative possibilities for ourselves to communicate with our audiences today.