"Early Music"

[vinteuil]

http://langhamresearch.co.uk

... Many thanks, M Gong². I shd have known someone wd be doing it!

Excellent news.

Another problem will be the shortage of "20th century harpsichords" for the Poulenc, Frank Martin etc repertoire. Few harpsichord builders now are interested in producing such beasts - and the existing ones are a dying breed. But they will be necessary for proper 'early music' performances of such works...

[doversoul1]

Apologies for going off the point but this looks good / was good (it’s a repeat)

Through the Night next Monday
John Shea presents a concert given by Ars Nova Copenhagen with Concerto Copenhagen conducted by Paul Hillier.

Schütz, Heinrich (1585-1672)
Uccellini, Marco (c.1603-1680)
Gabrieli, Giovanni (c.1553-1612)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qjm8n

Next week’s Composer of the Week will be the honorary early music composer, CPE Bach

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qjmfx

I enjoy listening to the 17th century instrumental music by the composers like Schmelzer and Merula who were (so I have heard) trying to prove that instrumental music could be as musical as human voice. Their music manages to sounds (to me) very happily unconstrained.

[Roehre]

... Many thanks, M Gong². I shd have known someone wd be doing it!

Excellent news.

Seconded

Another problem will be the shortage of "20th century harpsichords" for the Poulenc, Frank Martin etc repertoire. Few harpsichord builders now are interested in producing such beasts - and the existing ones are a dying breed. But they will be necessary for proper 'early music' performances of such works...

IIRC they are built on request by some harpsichord builders.

[Serial_Apologist]

The astonishing thing about the mathematical structures in the music of someone like Ockeghem is how well they can work musically even for a listener who understands nothing about them.

And JS Bach's. And Schoenberg's!

(Ducks behind sofa!)

[Serial_Apologist]

I am afraid you should listen to Ars subtilior composers (with composing techniques not heard again until resurfacing in the 20C), and a whole range of Netherlandish(Franco-Flemish) ones in order to appreciate that early baroque is a step in reverse in composing techniques, not more but less sophistication.
After that the sophistication increased, only to be "dropped" again at the time JSBach was considered to be old-fashioned (by his own offspring, but not only by them)

This is my reading-based understanding, too. How I would love to hear a programme devoted to the Flemish composers who wrote such complex music, what it sounded like, and what motivated them.

[Lat-Literal]

A lot of questions. To what extent was early music composed and played by the relatively uneducated? To what extent was it performed outdoors and for what purposes? Polyphony - I can honestly say that I could give a 15 minute talk on its appearance in the Mediterranean and Bulgarian folk music traditions but not one on any other aspect of it. A lack of a route map is essentially the problem with access to knowledge and further exploration. Troubadours - the number of them was astonishingly low and it is a bit of a mystery how they covered so much ground. How did they? It would also be interesting to know more about their individual character. Savall/Hesperion - vibrant, appealing, but would it be right to consider that what they and similar others produce is a very modern take? And with that in mind, there is something about some very early music, pre Baroque, that purely in sound terms can seem less - I am not quite sure what the word would be - inaccessible than some music in the periods immediately following it. I am not sure why that should be - is there any technical explanation? I am not necessarily looking for answers on all of these points but the list reveals what could be of interest from an "outsider's" perspective.

[Serial_Apologist]

A lot of questions. To what extent was early music composed and played by the relatively uneducated?

Somebody with knowledge of this area needs to reply to these questions but I would have assumed the amount of learning to be assiduously instilled in the ecclesiastical traditions that furnish the backbone of structural advances up to the Renaissance at least and probably the start of the Baroque. For one thing we know that the "authorities" were very strict on which modes were disallowed in given periods, albeit that secular rhythms periodically intruded to give rhythmic and metrical shape to plainchant-based polyphony as it developed.

To what extent was it performed outdoors and for what purposes?

To accompany the floats-conveyed pageants depicting dramatsied biblical stories and scenes, the forerunners of opera, in seasonal festive observances in Mediaeval Europe?

Polyphony - I can honestly say that I could give a 15 minute talk on its appearance in the Mediterranean and Bulgarian folk music traditions but not one on any other aspect of it.

How polyphony and an evolving harmonic sense of tension and release mutually engage are two mutually inseparable sides of the western musical tradition. I would surmise that the ways in which these sides interacted in folk musics would have informed the subsequent ways in which national classical music traditions took off. The Spanish baroque musics Richard T refers to upthread audibly bear this out.

A lack of a route map is essentially the problem with access to knowledge and further exploration. Troubadours - the number of them was astonishingly low and it is a bit of a mystery how they covered so much ground. How did they? It would also be interesting to know more about their individual character. Savall/Hesperion - vibrant, appealing, but would it be right to consider that what they and similar others produce is a very modern take? And with that in mind, there is something about some very early music, pre Baroque, that purely in sound terms can seem less - I am not quite sure what the word would be - inaccessible than some music in the periods immediately following it. I am not sure why that should be - is there any technical explanation? I am not necessarily looking for answers on all of these points but the list reveals what could be of interest from an "outsider's" perspective.

What makes some musics more accessible than others is often down to that combination of openness to new experiences with what one is accustomed to. My first ever experences of musics written in the pre-diatonic modes was that they sounded as alien as either the Indian Raga musics I was hearing around the same time in my mid-teens and also the Bartok string quartets, and to my surprise I found these experiences of early music corroborated by a contemporary modern composer I just happen to know who said that for him, too, singing in the trebles of his school choir, those flattened intervals in the Tallis just sounded all wrong! Normatives can be so limiting!!!

[BBMmk2]

I knew my opinion would spark controversy, but that's how I see it, I mean, JSB wasn't born till 1685.

[Serial_Apologist]

I knew my opinion would spark controversy, but that's how I see it, I mean, JSB wasn't born till 1685.

What was it we used to say?

In 1685
Bach, Handel and Scarlatti were alive.

The same issues arise in considering when musical modernism arose. The late Beethoven quartets? "Tristan"? "Boris Godenov"? "L'apres-midi d'un faun"? the music to words "I feel air from another planet" from Schoenberg's second string quartet? Varese's "Ameriques"? Or Messiaen's "Mode de valeurs et d'intensites"? One music teacher at the school I attended considered Borodin too modern for his sensibilities. And that was in the early 1960s!

[Lat-Literal]

Somebody with knowledge of this area needs to reply to these questions but I would have assumed the amount of learning to be assiduously instilled in the ecclesiastical traditions that furnish the backbone of structural advances up to the Renaissance at least and probably the start of the Baroque. For one thing we know that the "authorities" were very strict on which modes were disallowed in given periods, albeit that secular rhythms periodically intruded to give rhythmic and metrical shape to plainchant-based polyphony as it developed.



To accompany the floats-conveyed pageants depicting dramatsied biblical stories and scenes, the forerunners of opera, in seasonal festive observances in Mediaeval Europe?



How polyphony and an evolving harmonic sense of tension and release mutually engage are two mutually inseparable sides of the western musical tradition. I would surmise that the ways in which these sides interacted in folk musics would have informed the subsequent ways in which national classical music traditions took off. The Spanish baroque musics Richard T refers to upthread audibly bear this out.



What makes some musics more accessible than others is often down to that combination of openness to new experiences with what one is accustomed to. My first ever experences of musics written in the pre-diatonic modes was that they sounded as alien as either the Indian Raga musics I was hearing around the same time in my mid-teens and also the Bartok string quartets, and to my surprise I found these experiences of early music corroborated by a contemporary modern composer I just happen to know who said that for him, too, singing in the trebles of his school choir, those flattened intervals in the Tallis just sounded all wrong! Normatives can be so limiting!!!

Yes, thank you very much for those points. Clearly considerable substance in what you are saying and I will think on.

But didn't Howard Goodall depict one of the earliest musical forms being played on an early instrument at Whitby?

I'd like to think the re-enactment was outside any building there - links with the elements etc - but maybe it wasn't!

[Richard Tarleton]

To what extent was early music composed and played by the relatively uneducated? To what extent was it performed outdoors and for what purposes?

The domestic element was important - the way people played music at home, tablature/parts on one piece of paper facing 3-4 ways for performance around the table....

This is my favourite picture in the National Gallery - Costa's A Concert, dated 1485-95.

[Lat-Literal]

The domestic element was important - the way people played music at home, tablature/parts on one piece of paper facing 3-4 ways for performance around the table....

This is my favourite picture in the National Gallery - Costa's A Concert, dated 1485-95.

That's lovely - thanks Richard.

Definitely want to broaden my approach to it from this angle. A sense of the people - studious or not - makes it more accessible. The way I tend to think of it - it is very academic or film soundtrack - period piece - or piped in NT buildings. All fine - but it needs to be perceived socially and environmentally. Instinctively, I feel I will attach to it and be keen.

[doversoul1]

That's lovely - thanks Richard.

Definitely want to broaden my approach to it from this angle. A sense of the people - studious or not - makes it more accessible. The way I tend to think of it - it is very academic or film soundtrack - period piece - or piped in NT buildings. All fine - but it needs to be perceived socially and environmentally. Instinctively, I feel I will attach to it and be keen.

Try this Early Music Late. Simon Heighes talks about how music was part of social life. (not early music but you'll get some idea)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06p4t0j

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Simon Heighes talks about how music was part of social life.

We could learn a lot from this. Social life now appears to be millions of people walking along the streets by themselves, each with a phone 14 inches in front of them, miserably conversing with people several miles away, but bumping into the people who are actually close by.

[oddoneout]

Oh, that picture brings back some memories! It was/is on the front of the second penguin book of madrigals - there was a similar picture on the first book. They were a staple 'take along' to the various youth orchestras, music courses and informal singing groups I was lucky enough to be part of in the 70's.