What is early music?

[ardcarp]

...or rather, what isn't early music? My thoughts are triggered by listening to Live in Concert this evening, the first half of which featured Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp. The band was The Academy of Ancient Music, and all I can say is, I wish they'd steer clear of 'the classics'. It was all very worthy, but extraordinarily lifeless. The slow movement in particular seemed entirely expression-free. Transferring Baroque performance practice to Mozart just didn't work, especially the shortening of note-values and chopping up of phrases.

I can just about accept that the High Baroque squeaks under the 'early' umbrella. But Mozart? Nah.

Any thoughts?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It's all relative. I think of anything pre-Palestrina as "early" as I know so little about the minnesingers, jongleurs, Josquin, Ockegham, etc.

[Roehre]

for me Early music ends with the baroque, say 1650s, nearly immediately following Monteverdi.
Hence music from (high) renaissance and earlier.

[Bryn]

Anything before Charles Ives, for me.

[Petrushka]

Haydn remains the dividing line for me.

[DracoM]

And, actually, ardcarp, the orchestra tonight had some pretty dodgy tuning at various places too.
For me it's possibly before 1500. After that Renaissance, and then Baroque.
Maybe.

[Beef Oven!]

The first 5 minutes of La Mer.

[Despina dello Stagno]

...or rather, what isn't early music? My thoughts are triggered by listening to Live in Concert this evening, the first half of which featured Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp. The band was The Academy of Ancient Music, and all I can say is, I wish they'd steer clear of 'the classics'. It was all very worthy, but extraordinarily lifeless. The slow movement in particular seemed entirely expression-free. Transferring Baroque performance practice to Mozart just didn't work, especially the shortening of note-values and chopping up of phrases.

I can just about accept that the High Baroque squeaks under the 'early' umbrella. But Mozart? Nah.

Any thoughts?

"Early music" is primarily a lazy label as meaningless as "jazz", "folk" 0r "world". The only purpose is, in this world with a plethora of choice, to steer the casual auditor towards a bin in which he knows he is likely to find something in accord with his own preferences, and thus to save him time.
However, several decades ago it meant rather more. Even then, the term was lazy journalese, but it did tend to denote a particular mindset. It is a little fanciful to compare it to punk, for that would be do downgrade early contributions from e.g. Boyd Neal, Dennis Stevens, to Leonhardt, to all artists appearing in the early 60s on Archiv (Harnoncourt et al). But I think of the school of c. '68, i.e. David Munrow, John Becket, Christopher Hogwood as kick-starting the movement in this country (egged on by Thurston Dart). Munrow died in the year of punk: each movement at that time was characterised by a d.i.y. ethic, an iconoclastic attitude sceptical of received wisdom, and YOUTH. All the pillars of the early music movement have grown old together (some more gracefully than others). There was a willingness to put fresh scholarship (sometimes bordering on autodidactic instinct) into performance. The period they tackled has spread both forwards and back, so that pretty well any style not supported by contemporaneous recordings is now considered fair game.
So it is not really a case that periods or composers are unsuitable, but that the scholarship shewn by a particular band on a particular occasion might be ill-judged in its approach. A favourite analogy used to be that the scholars were working like restorers of old pictures, clearing away the grime of years to see the colours afresh.
Clearly for you, on this occasion, the restorer did not rise to the challenge. It happens. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...m-8762069.html

[Tony Halstead]

...or rather, what isn't early music? My thoughts are triggered by listening to Live in Concert this evening, the first half of which featured Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp. The band was The Academy of Ancient Music, and all I can say is, I wish they'd steer clear of 'the classics'. It was all very worthy, but extraordinarily lifeless. The slow movement in particular seemed entirely expression-free. Transferring Baroque performance practice to Mozart just didn't work, especially the shortening of note-values and chopping up of phrases.

I can just about accept that the High Baroque squeaks under the 'early' umbrella. But Mozart? Nah.

Any thoughts?

That recording of the Mozart Flute and harp Concerto was made nearly 30 years ago. I remember playing in the orchestra. The Bassoon Concerto was recorded in the same group of sessions.
These days I think the AAM (and their soloists) would play those pieces in a freer, less doctrinaire, more 'expressive' and (dare I suggest it?) more 'Romantic' way.

[MickyD]

I think ardcarp was referring to the live concert rather than the AAM recording, Tony.

I remember being privileged enough to be allowed in to watch those sessions of the Bassoon Concerto...every time I hear the last movement, I am reminded of it! Happy days.

[ardcarp]

Indeed....

Live from Milton Court, London

The Academy of Ancient Music performs music by inspired by Paris and Vienna - Mozart's sparkling flute and harp concerto, and Gluck's ballet masterpiece Don Juan.

What counts as 'early' must mean different things to different people. Having crystallised my thoughts overnight, the onset of stile galante marks the boundary for me. Not much s-g in AAM last night, though.

[Richard Tarleton]

Even then, the term was lazy journalese, but it did tend to denote a particular mindset. It is a little fanciful to compare it to punk, for that would be do downgrade early contributions from e.g. Boyd Neal, Dennis Stevens, to Leonhardt, to all artists appearing in the early 60s on Archiv (Harnoncourt et al). But I think of the school of c. '68, i.e. David Munrow, John Becket, Christopher Hogwood as kick-starting the movement in this country (egged on by Thurston Dart).

Not forgetting Julian Bream, who made the initial journey rather earlier and all by himself, and pursued his interest in early music outside the academic/purist mainstream whilst bringing it to a worldwide audience. Bream was also initially "egged on by Thurston Dart", but then, as Bream says,

After a short while of helping me, he suddenly attacked my style of playing, saying it was not the sound which Dowland...would have made...the lute...should be played with the finger tips and not the nails, he said, I made the lute sound brash...I should pluck nearer the bridge, and avoid the considerable changes of dynamic and tone that were already becoming characteristics of my guitar playing.

His first all-Dowland solo lute album, played on a (by today's standards) rather dubious lute built for him by Tom Goff, was made in 1957. This was followed by an LP of lute songs with Peter Pears in 1958, another solo lute LP in 1961, and the first LP by the Julian Bream Consort in 1962. Much more, leading up to his best-selling RCA album "Dances of Dowland" in 1967. Dart did, however, continue to write appreciative sleeve notes to Bream's lute recordings.

I know Weiss was a baroque composer but in persisting in writing for the lute, fast heading for a Cretaceous-style extinction by 1750, I instinctively regard him as having one foot in the early music camp!

[MrGongGong]

Anything before Charles Ives, for me.

Or this (you do have to get up early to hear it)

Every time I see AAM I read it as AMM

[Tony Halstead]

I think ardcarp was referring to the live concert rather than the AAM recording, Tony.

I remember being privileged enough to be allowed in to watch those sessions of the Bassoon Concerto...every time I hear the last movement, I am reminded of it! Happy days.

yes, sorry, my misunderstanding, MickyD, it was 5.34 this morning! ( Why is the MB's time an hour ahead?)

So you were present at those Bond/ Hogwood bassoon sessions..1987 maybe? which I, too, enjoyed enormously. What a small world it is!

[MickyD]

Yes, I was there, Tony, the Henry Wood Hall, am I right in thinking? I was a guest, at that time avidly writing the Friends of the AAM Newsletter! Long before the internet, sending out photocopied newsletters to fans.