In the world of Early Music, playing something on "original instruments" means to play it using instruments appropriate to the historical era in which the music was written. But beyond that, it also means attempting to re-create the performance style of an era.
In other words, don't try to play Bach like it's Bruckner.
The trouble is that no matter how authentic the performance might be, the audience is never going to be authentic. The musicians can be as historically accurate as they want to be; they can perform on instruments of the period, they can re-create the tuning, the phrasing, the interpretation; all of that mishegas. They can (hypothetically) give a performance that exactly re-creates the music as it sounded the first time it was ever performed. But this new, hyper-authentic performance is going to reach the ears of an audience that is completely different from the audience of the time.
When an audience listens to Bach today, they are hearing Bach in the context of everything that happened after Bach. We can't just pretend that we have never heard Mozart, or Bruckner, or Duke Ellington, or the Spice Girls - and because we have heard all of those things, we are nothing like the audiences of Bach's lifetime. We can't unlearn what we have learned.
Which brings me very neatly to Star Wars.
Sitting here at the end of 2021, Star Wars is a franchise (hell, it's a religion; almost four hundred thousand people listed their religion as "Jedi" in the 2001 UK Census). There have been movies and video games and books and toys and at least one very disturbing lollipop (don't ask) and the original film has been modified so many times as to be nearly unrecognisable.
But in the beginning there was just one film, and it was released almost 45 years ago in a country that was still coming to terms with Watergate and Vietnam and the Civil Rights Act.
To see that film, I need to ask you to forget about this:
And this:
And also this (oh, please forget about this):
You even need to forget about all this:
In 1977, when the original film was released, all of that was still in the future, and no one was thinking about any of it, because that's not what Star Wars was all about. Star Wars was about all of this:
George Lucas was born in 1944 and, along with many others of his generation, had grown up immersed in the popular culture of the 40s and 50s. It was the action and adventure movies of his childhood that had inspired him to become a film-maker, but unfortunately for him, the America he found himself living in as an adult was nothing like the America of his youth.
Star Wars was conceived as an attempt to re-capture the spirit of all those swash-buckling adventure yarns that had so made an impression on the young George Lucas, and it was offered as a fun, nostalgic throwback to entertain those of his own generation who were worn out by decades of violence, race riots, political corruption, Flower Power and the Vietnam War. The world might be falling apart in front of them, but those depressed and exhausted adults could at least spend an enjoyable two hours in the movie theatre re-living the fun and excitement of their fondly-remembered youth.
What Lucas had not anticipated was that
Star Wars would make a huge impression - not just on the Baby Boomers who had grown up on all this stuff, but on
their kids; the next generation, who were too young to remember
Flash Gordon or
The Dam Busters or Erol Flynn, but who responded to the new movie with the same excitement and wonder that George Lucas and his generation had felt for the source material.
This new generation had not yet seen any WWII movies, and they had never heard of Alec Guinness, but they fell in love with Star Wars precisely because it was so different from everything else in the 1970s. This was a movie that proved to an entire generation that Cinema could be fun.
And thus, a multi-billion dollar industry was born.
This Thursday (the 2nd of December) I hope to show Star Wars as it originally was in 1977. Not the corporate mega-brand it eventually became, but the simple love-letter to a bygone era of movie-making that it was at the beginning: the joyful adventure movie that so captivated audiences of the time.
Star Wars on original instruments.
Such an undertaking may or may not be possible, but... I have a good feeling about this!
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