What Is Early Music?

[doversoul1]

You're definitely an early music composer if you depend totally on HIPP ensembles to get heard!

If I read this as ‘you are not an early music composer unless you depend totally on HIPP ensembles to get heard’, a lot of Renaissance polyphony composers will be disqualified, as they are often performed by the BBC Singers.

[jean]

I think the rule applies only if you are late enough for your status to be in doubt.

[BBMmk2]

My definition of Early Music is up to the Baroque Period and ending in 1759.

[Beef Oven!]

Grieg, Morning.

[Ian]

"What is early music"

It doesn't matter. When any music is performed, or listened to - "early" or whatever, it becomes contemporary music.

[richardfinegold]

As the pre-Bach music started to get the deserved attention more widely, i.e. from the mid 1960s onwards, "Early Music" was understood to be music before JSBach, therefore ending at around 1700.

It is no coincidence IMO that the HIP-"movement" developed alongside this re-discovery of an earlier past, together b.t.w. with a tendency in contemporary music to make more use of smaller ensembles than symphony orcehstras but larger than the up to ten musicians for chamber music.

It has got to be recalled, that until the mid 1950s even Vivaldi was a rather obscure and unknown composer (that ended with the Four Seasons recording of I Musici iirc, 1955?)

Monteverdi, let alone the Burgundian (Flemish/Dutch/Franco-schools [roughly: Dufay-Sweelinck]), or earlier music like de Machaut, let alone from the Toubadours/Trovères/Minnesänger, was written about, but hardly if at all performed. Stravinsky's interest in Gesualdo is a spin-off of this re-discovery of pre-1700 music e.g.

Pre-1700s is therefore roughly Early Music as we then did understand it, and IMO a definition which still makes sense for the majority of the "classical" listeners whose main interests lay roughly between say JSBach and Bartok.

That description of a a "majority classical listener" pretty much describes me. I appreciate the answers of all that have responded. I can see where listeners who came of age in the 1960s or before regard Bach and Vivaldi, and all Baroque as "Early" Music. Those of us that grew up with the Brandenbergs and the 4 Seasons being routinely used as background music for television commercials or elevator trips tend to think of Baroque Music as more in the line of standard rep, and define Early Music as the stuff that predates Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.

[MrGongGong]

Grieg, Morning.

Varese

[french frank]

up to the Baroque Period and ending in 1759.

Dec 30th?

[MrGongGong]

Dec 30th?

Precision is important

Actually, I once had a couple of days in the Wigmore Hall archives and looking at the publicity photos "Early Music" is easily identified by knitwear

[LeMartinPecheur]

If I read this as ‘you are not an early music composer unless you depend totally on HIPP ensembles to get heard’, a lot of Renaissance polyphony composers will be disqualified, as they are often performed by the BBC Singers.

I've never done philosophical logic but I'm convinced that your reading is completely erroneous, ds!

[richardfinegold]

Should we also include more contemporary Composers that consciously try to emulate an early music period? How about the recently deceased John Taverner, or RVW?