"Early Music"

[vinteuil]

We need a reference earlier than 1925.

The BBC and the British Museum however seem to think that Dolmetsch's festival was called either the Haslemere Festival of Music or the Haslemere Festival of Chamber Music, neither of which seem distinctive enough for what the Festival was doing.

But the BBC and the BM could be wrong.

.

Dolmetsch's Interpretation of Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries dates from 1915. I think I have a copy - but it's in one of the eighty five unsorted boxes in the loft, and I don't currently have the will-power to find it to see if he uses the term 'early'....

[Lat-Literal]

We need a reference earlier than 1925.

Possible sources:

Margaret Campbell - Dolmetsch. The Man and His Work
Andrew Mayes - Carl Dolmetsch and the Recorder Repertoire of the 20th Century
Teri Noel Towe - Bach in Britain in the 1920s
Dr John Catch - History of the Viola da Gamba Society 1948-1998
Harry Haskell - The Early Music Revival - A History

I think it would be useful too to look at the Arts and Crafts Movement - Morris - and perhaps Grainger.

If I am going to be ever so slightly picky, I am a little cautious of having a reference to 1925 or earlier and then a huge gap to the 1970s. It isn't wrong but it is rather like saying Rutland Boughton was the founder of the first Glastonbury Festival which he was and he wasn't if you get my drift. I'd prefer to see some additional references in the 1940s-1950s.

This has already been a bit of an education for me. With the above point in mind, I did go searching for a reference in connection with The Third Programme which ran from 1946 to 1970. Regrettably, I didn't find any such reference but I was surprised to discover just how restrictive was the timing of its broadcasts until 1965-67. Furthermore, I found references to accusations of elitism "from the outset" of which I was aware. But what I was thrilled to find was that the individual who wanted to turn Britain into quote, a "Third Programme Nation" was the Jarrow marchers' champion, Ellen Wilkinson. As I said to Stanley a while back, when I was campaigning in the 1983 Election on the council estates of York, I was stopped on the pavement for half an hour by an elderly gentleman. Initially from Jarrow, he wanted to tell me all about what a wonderful woman Ellen had been.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The certainty in the use of the term is interesting given that the festival had only been established five years earlier. I have to say that I hadn't realised until now just how significant York is to Early Music.

Oh, yes - the York Early Music Festival is one of the triumvirate of Music Festivals established in the mid-late '70s in the North of England, the other two being the Durham Oriental Music Festival (sadly no longer with us) for "World Music", and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

[Lat-Literal]

Oh, yes - the York Early Music Festival is one of the triumvirate of Music Festivals established in the mid-late '70s in the North of England, the other two being the Durham Oriental Music Festival (sadly no longer with us) for "World Music", and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

Thanks - it's a bit odd because I was aware of the Mystery Plays in Museum Gardens.

The York Waits would have been involved but I didn't connect then with the categories.

[doversoul1]

Credit for familialising the term ‘early music’ in British music culture along with much else besides, must go to […] David Munrow. In choosing, in 1967, the Early Music Consort of London as the name for his newly-formed specialist period performance group, and coincidentally having a hand in the naming of the Early Music Shop launched a year later, Munrow had effectively hit upon a workable Anglicisation of ‘Alte Musuk’, […] (p19)

Richard Wood, the founder of the Early Music Shop […] 'We [Wood and Munrow] even sat down and talked about a name – because early music was not a generic term at the stage –
[…]
So we actually invented the name, […] And we registered the name – and people like Early Music magazine and even the Early Music Centre had to write to us for permission to use it'. (p100)

Making Early Music in the Modern Age; The Art of Re-enchantment by Nick Wilson (2014)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Re-enchantment-Making-Early-Modern/dp/0199939934/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1448823115&sr=1-1

[jean]

Yes of course - I had just remembered the Early Music Consort, can't think why it didn't occur to me earlier as I listened to them often enough!

And there was the Telefunken sub-label Das Alte Werk

But if Munrow & co. invented the term, what of the Dolmetsch claim? Was Neil Mc Gregor right and their festival didn't call itself The Haslemere Festival of Early Music after all?

Carl Dolmetsch's obituary mentions only the Haslemere Festival. Haslemere's tourist website advertises The International Dolmetsch Early Music Festival but the name could well have been tweaked more recently.

.

[doversoul1]

I think what Wilson means is that some kind of consensus had been reached by the way David Munrow used it; that the term ‘early music’ came to cover the earliest to roughly the end of Baroque rather than each user referring to separate period. As for ‘inventing’, they turned it into a proper noun. I assume it was only when anybody else wanted to use it as part of a name, then they’d have to ask for the permission. I don’t think Richard Wood meant that they invented the actual term. Dolmetsch’s festival could well have been Early Music Festival, since the term must have been in use for Munrow to familiarise it. I’m afraid this still doesn’t answer your question of when it was first used.

[doversoul1]

Through the Night: Monday 30

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

I have a feeling that I posted this twice on the Early Music on TTN, so for a change…

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Smashing research, dovers - It's possible that Dolmetsch originally used the name, but it didn't catch (ho-ho) on and so Munrow may or may not have had it in his subconscious when the expression came to him. Wha'evva - it caught on: in 1977 the Ensemble für frühe Musik was founded in Augsberg.


EDIT: Apologies to Lats for overlooking his post from which Richard quotes in #100 - what I mean here is that it's possible that Dolmetsch thought up the phrase "Early Music", but because his was such a "specialist niche" at the time - and (if Lucky Jim is any indication of the regard in which later enthusiasm for this repertoire was held) probably an eccentric one at that - it didn't find widespread popularity, but might have been known to some of Munrow's supporters.

[Richard Tarleton]

If I am going to be ever so slightly picky, I am a little cautious of having a reference to 1925 or earlier and then a huge gap to the 1970s.

I don't think there was a gap - rather, part of the problem (possibly ) may have been that while there was a vibrant early music movement from the 1920s, few people outside its rather closed world knew about it? I realise this does not answer the question of when the term was first used. The Schola Cantorum Basiliensis was founded in 1933....I saw August Wenzinger and the SCB doing St John Passion in the Sheldonian in 1969, and saw Eugen Dombois playing the lute in the Holywell Music Room, seminal experiences both.

With regard to the lute....Diana Poulton, Dowland's biographer, began her lute studies with Dolmetsch in 1922, having met him just after WWl. Interesting article about her here. She began doing broadcasts on the BBC in 1926, at the invitation of Julian Herbage, and went on to do 400 as "The Lady with the Lute" . She became Professor of Lute at the RCM in 1968 (succeeded in due course by Jakob Lindberg). There is a new-ish (2013) biography of her. The Lute Society was founded in 1956. There were plenty of lutenists around by then, but it took the modern recording era, and Julian Bream in particular (first all-Dowland lute recording 1957), for it to reach a wider audience.

[BBMmk2]

Would people here, forgive me for raising this poinrt again, but Early Music, would that end with the beginnings of JSB, Handel and Telemann, etc?

[jean]

I don't think there was a gap - rather, part of the problem (possibly ) may have been that while there was a vibrant early music movement from the 1920s, few people outside its rather closed world knew about it?

Yes, that's certainly true.

The interest in early sacred choral music and early secular instrumental music developed largely independently of each other. There had always been odd bits of early music lurking within cathedral services as part of the wider Anglican tradition; it was the great Richard Terry who began to research and perform plainsong and Renaissance music extensively:

R R Terry was a musical pioneer whose work as Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral between 1902 and 1924 is legendary. The musical roadmap that Richard Terry charted for London’s new Roman Catholic cathedral remains largely unrevised today. Plainchant and Renaissance polyphony are the bedrock of Westminster Cathedral’s sung liturgy—early music is the root from which the cathedral’s musical endeavours have branched for over a century.

(The use of the term early music there isn't Terry's of course.)

Michael Howard founded the Renaissance Singers in 1944 and brought this repertoire into the concert hall - or more accurately, to commercial recording (for Argos) and to non-liturgical performance in churches - it wasn't until the 1970s that groups such as Musica Reservata (founded in 1960) and in due course the Early Music Consort burst upon the London concert scene and began to take over the Queen Elizabeth Hall and fill it with a new audience. I remember being both astonished and delighted at this development, but wishing that the choral repertoire could get similar exposure; The Thomas Tallis Society was founded in 1965 but I cannot remember that they gave sell-out concerts until much later.

I just wish I could remember what name I gave all this to myself as I discovered it from the 1960s onwards!

[doversoul1]

Would people here, forgive me for raising this poinrt again, but Early Music, would that end with the beginnings of JSB, Handel and Telemann, etc?

This is just my thoughts but because there have been an awful lot of ‘discoveries’ of hitherto unknown or little known composers from the mid to late 18th century whose music is seen as ‘transitional’*, drawing a line has become a bit dodgy. I suppose you have to say on what basis you are drawing the line. But unless you have to submit a research proposal of some kind, I think it is safe to think that in general terms, early music comfortably covers all the music by JSB, Handel and Telemann.

*I think CPE Bach is a good example. And he is a Composer of the Week from today.

These days, many HIPP orchestras are looking to later and later eras. I can understand the attraction of performing Beethoven in HIPP but I wish more British ensembles would look into earlier works. There are still so much to discover.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Perhaps if Bbm had started a Thread called "What Music written before c1600 are you listening to now?", we might be listing pieces by now.


(After my smartalek initial post about "just before teatime" that everyone would have the good taste to pretend hadn't happened.)

[Bryn]

This is just my thoughts but because there have been an awful lot of ‘discoveries’ of hitherto unknown or little known composers from the mid to late 18th century whose music is seen as ‘transitional’*, drawing a line has become a bit dodgy. I suppose you have to say on what basis you are drawing the line. But unless you have to submit a research proposal of some kind, I think it is safe to think that in general terms, early music comfortably covers all the music by JSB, Handel and Telemann.

*I think CPE Bach is a good example. And he is a Composer of the Week from today.

These days, many HIPP orchestras are looking to later and later eras. I can understand the attraction of performing Beethoven in HIPP but I wish more British ensembles would look into earlier works. There are still so much to discover.

CPE Bach an example of an 'Early Music' composer? That really is stretching it. Why not consider all composers of the Classical period, Beethoven included, as 'Early Music' composers?