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Early music?

  
 
telyn
20:01 / 09.01.03
By which I mean anything composed before 1750 or thereabouts. I'm not asking for recommendations (this is my subject area), but I'd like to know what other people think about early music. Does anyone listen to any early music (medieval, renaissance, baroque etc...) or is it an entirely insular musical phenomena, known only about by musos who studied it at college?

I also want to know what impressions you may/may not have about this particular music movement. Also, do you think there any point in 'reviving' music from a past age?
 
 
that
20:56 / 09.01.03
I like what I've heard, which isn't much. Would love to hear more, but wouldn't know where to start... I do think there's a point in 'reviving' music from a past age, (as long as it's not hair metal -except if you're trying to be funny) - I mean, why on earth not? People enjoy it, and it's as much a piece of history as the artifacts in museums...I don't see much difference between early music and classical music as regards continuing to play it.

And there are more ways than one to 'revive' music - for instance, Dead Can Dance have used early music as a jumping off point, as well as covering stuff like a 'Saltarello' that I'd previously heard on a Naxos collection...
 
 
The Strobe
21:04 / 09.01.03
I've dabbled in this area. I've sung a lot of renaissance stuff - Palestrina, Allegri, etc - and played a lot of Baroque. I'm really attracted to the Baroque, mainly because of the forms it produces: strict, rigorous ones. My love of JS Bach is well known, but I've enjoyed CPE as well. And Telemann's recorder/flute sonatas are simply fantastic. Can't quite pin down why, but there's something about single part + figured bass that always does something for me.

Similarly, the harmonies present in, say, the Allegri Misereri - these remarkbly open, hollow chords (this is the only language I can describe it in) that have power but only just, threatening to collapse - Soprano (or whatever the part should be called) at one extremity, Bass at the other - is just quite unique. Similarly: Tallis, Mudd, et al.

I ought to listen to more, in that I ought to listen to more classical music in general; but the renaissance and baroque stuff I've played or heard I've loved, far more than much of the stuff "in the middle", as it were. It suits my brain, my instruments, certainly my voice (where pure tone and hitting the note is valued more than fucking vibrato and emoting) and my ear.

Point in 'reviving' music from a past age? Hmn. Music comes and goes, in fads - not just in the present, but also historically. People come in and out of fashion; I recall hearing Bach needed a revival - think it was Mendelssohn who revived the Bach organ works from being barely played. So 'revival' is partly a feeling of the times - particularly if, say, the present music has something to say about the past, or the acknowledge influence of X on Y brings about a revival of X.

Music is not dead when its composer is. Music, like most art (and hence the distinction people make between 'true art' and popular movements), aspires to permanence. In my opinion. So it should live on in whatever form. As the canon increases, well, there's less people to keep every composer alive. And so some die out. Which ones? Well, for a start, the bad ones - all the Bach-imitators, say, who copied him because his style was popular or acknolwedged. Then you have to account for trends. And so on. So music should be being revived, or at least, dug out of the cupboard by a nosy student who discovers something new and wonderful (maybe) or realises why whatever was in there was left there.

A question for you or other early-music bods: what about the value of playing music on period instruments? I've been curious about this for a while, having never heard (say) the Orchestra of the Age of Englightenment or similar groups who play music on instruments from the time it was composed. My feelings are mixed: I'd be intrigued, as an experiment, so I know what would have been heard, etc, and so that players have limitations. But more modern instruments - in the case of string instruments, still not that modern - are often easier for the player, more consistent in tuning, etc. And it is, after all, being played in modern times. And so surely a modern interpretation should use modern instruments? I have no idea which is "correct", and I'd tend to be interested in either performance. (Of course, for, say, medieval work, most instruments such as theorbo, lute, etc, are probably replicas of early instruments, so it's impossible NOT to play on a correct instrument - you wouldn't play lute parts on a guitar... woulld you? It's only when the instruments are essentially the same as modern ones the problem arises).

Finally: "insular". Hmn. Classical music is, these days, a fairly insular thing, sadly. And the further you go back... the more obscure you get? Maybe. I don't know much medieval stuff at all, have done odd bits of plainsong but that's about it. So it might be an area, especially the medieval stuff, that is harder to gain knowledge on. Hence why people with deeper levels of study and deeper resources are more likely to know/be interested by it.

I tend to like it all, though, and will happily go and listen to new things in this vein. If I discover they're on.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
21:31 / 09.01.03
I like early music, me. I think I came to it through some fantastic discs on Naxos: there's one called "On The Road To Bethlehem: Music Of The Medieval Pilgrim" that does what it says on the tin in an exceptionally sexy way.

I think there is a split in the way early music is perceived, too: it's like there's the "serious" purveyors of the craft - the Jordi Savalls and Hesperion ensembles, the Tallis Scholars and the Hogwoods, and then there's the somehow less-credible hackers - the Morris Dancer-meets-Mike-Oldfield kind of weekend early music player. Does that make sense? I guess I'm not formulating my words well, but it's like there's a distinct split between label-housed ensembles and those who aren't - and somehow the former are seen as being more authoritative. Which to me is kinda amusing, given that for a lot of this music, there's still a lot of question over what it might've sounded like anyway.

But maybe that's a snobby classical music split - I see the same thing between local ensembles and those tied to DG - one's meant to be better than the other, even if - like Gil fucking Shaham - they're the most boring, uninspired ass on the planet.

There's a great quote that I will paraphrase and not attribute because I can't remember exactly who said it - or what precisely was said - but it was to the effect of "you can't listen to Bach when you've got Beethoven in your ears". That is, your perception of music will be coloured by what you hear, particularly in so-called classical music because it's very much a case of building upon established traditions. In this case, it means that my listening to early music is more effective if I've not been listening to any sort of classical music for a while - otherwise the purity and unadorned nature of it seems to be something annoying, if compared to the texture of a Mahler symph, say?

Ramble. More later.
 
 
Jack Fear
13:06 / 10.01.03
I listen to quite a bit of early vocal music: Anonymous 4, Ensemble P.A.N., and whoever it was that did A Feather on the Breath of God, which is an album of songs by Hildegard von Bingen—oh, and the Kronos Quartet's Early Music disc (which is actually a bit of a cheat, as it includes modern compositions written in the early-music style).

For those who are not experts in the field: the thing to realize is that this music was composed before the introduction of even temperament, that is, before the determination of absolute mathematical distinctions between pitches: so sometimes the notes fall between the notes on a piano. It's difficult to overstate how much the idea of even temperament has changed music, and even the larger society: I recommend Stuart Isacoff's book Temperament, for more on that.

The medieval ear had its own ideas of consonance and dissonance and resolution: listening to it, finding its internal logic, is a useful exercise, in the same way that listening to Javanese gamelan, or Schoenberg, or anything not squarely in the Western tonal tradition, is useful—it makes the familiar new again, by playing with your expectations and laying bare all the conventions that you take for granted as absolutes, and exposing them as essentially arbitrary. It's a great earwash, in other words.

It's good for meditation, I find, because I'm not distracted by trying to "follow" the piece musically: in structure and tonality, it's alien to my ear, so I simply accept it without analyzing. I find it soothing, in the same way that listening to foreign-language radio broadcasts is soothing—there's something very grounding about hearing the calm, measured tones of a newsman giving the headlines in Danish.

Some of these issues and ideas were kicked around in an earlier thread on non-Western music, which also has a ton of cool links within.
 
 
telyn
14:48 / 10.01.03
Cheers Jack, I had come across that thread but I forgot about it.

There is a huge difference in the approach to early music compared to classical music. In many respects early music is far closer to jazz, or world music or folk. Not as much is notated, more is improvised and there is a far greater emphasis on performance practice, a common set of rules on how you would perform a piece of music.

As a general rule, notation has got more and more explicit and specific as time goes on. Contemporary compositions often have keys at the front specifying technique or that a particular sound is required.
Most medieval music has only one or two lines of melody notated, and frequently these are in plainchant notation or neumes which have no rhythmic values! Just one more reason why early music is often a scholarly effort, not just a musical one.

Jack - bang on about the temperament. JS Bach wrote his Well-Tempered Clavier to celebate the development of a tuning system that coped with more than one key at once. Even so it wasn't perfect - in the keys furthest away from C major Bach wrote using runs and arpeggios to disguise the fact that chords in those keys still weren't in tune. It wasn't until much later that even temperament became common use. We think of pianos as being in tune, but they're not really. Pianos are a big fat compromise in any key.

As an early musician you do have to have damn good ears, because the music is often sparse using intervals of a fifth and an octaves and if you are out of tune it will sound *awful*.

There is an early music split, but as usual it is between artist or scholarly endeavour and populised commercialism. Compare the Mediavel Baebes with Sequentia for instance. I don't want to try and modernise early music too much because I love it as it is, but each time you play/sing a piece there is so much reconstruction and so many ways you could arrange it that is made afresh each time.
 
 
grant
18:16 / 10.01.03
I love the stuff to death because, I think, it's not chordal. There are all these pieces of chords floating around disassembled, wanting your brain to put them together. I love that shifty counterpoint stuff.

Yo-Yo Ma recently did a couple CDs of baroque music. In the liner notes, he talks about the differences between a baroque cello and his modern instrument.
He had instrument makers *modify his Stradivarius cello* to make it more true to the period. They flattened and lowered the bridge (which I just know threw the tuning out of whack), would have widened the fingerboard if they coulda, and removed the endpin. Because in that era, cellists clenched their instruments between their legs like overexcited sitar players, or like they were riding greased pigs.
Ma said (or implied) that was the hardest part.

One of the things I think he mentioned, and that I'd heard in other places, was that a lot of early music wasn't just written with a loose idea of tuning... it was written with the idea that the musicians were going to improvise around the theme. Which is something Western music (officially) lost sometime in the 1700s and only got back now. Hail, hail rock and jazz.

What I'd like to know is -- what *form* did those improvisations take? Was it ornamentation with new notes? Shifting tempos? Rhythm games? What?

Oh, and Allegri is singularly beautiful.
 
 
The Strobe
20:05 / 10.01.03
Don't know much about Medieval improvisation, though I'm sure harmony can fill you in. Certainly in Baroque and Renaissance music, though, there's figured bass, which leads to a kind of improvisation - not from the soloist but the accompniast.

Essentially: you have a melody. You have a bass part. There are numbers placed over the bass part that refer to which parts of the chord you are to play. For instance: if you have a C with "5 3" written under it (numbers written vertically, ie, 5 over 3) then you add the third and fifth - e and g - and it's C major. 6 4 is the subdominant, similarly, so in C, an F with "6 4" above it is F major .You can add C major in any way, though, whatever voicing you like, so the accompniast has some freedom on how he voices his accompniament on the harpsichord, especially if there's a cellist/equivalent playing the bassline (though root note is always specified). That's about it. I'm not as familiar on the subject as I was, it's been a while since I've done it.

The nearest modern analogy, though, is the jazz lead sheet. To wit: melody, chord symbols written above. You know how it goes, you know what the chords are, but voice them how you will. I produced a piece with figured bass for a GCSE composition; baroque melody thing wrote itself quite well, and I could come up with a bass part, but was getting stumped... so just wrote in jazz-style-notation chords over the top and was taught to convert them into figured bass. Easy way out, maybe, but appropriate and interesting. This is another way to link jazz to early music. I'm not sure that's something should do that often, but hey, it's kind-of appropriate this time. And covers both my musical loves in one fell swoop.

Improvisation in other stuff, especially earlier, medieval music, probably comes down to that lack of specific notation harmony mentioned earlier.
 
 
The Monkey
21:11 / 10.01.03
I've developed a fondness for Anonynous 4, who do medieval hymns and other (secular) polyphonic pieces. Most of their stuff is a cappella, and the four comprising women all have near-perfect pitch. It's quite lovely...and I now see that Jack mentioned them first. Well, consider them seconded.

Monteverdi, both as a madrigal writer and an early classical composer, does some breathtaking stuff. I'm particularly fond of the madrigals. Apparently he even did one of the early operas, but I haven't heard it.

Whether or not it's kosher "early music," there's a lot to be said for Carl Orff's arrangements of the Carmina Burana. "O Fortuna" still thrills me in spite of its usage in every Conan-the-Barbarian-esque film *ever*, and the lesser known pieces are also good, it not so rollicking.

Can anyone remember if Gluck would be considered Baroque?
 
 
telyn
17:59 / 11.01.03
I think Gluck is on the cusp between late Baroque and Classical. From my (rather vague) knowledge of the composer I think he does land more squarely in the classical vein.

There is very little documented medieval instrumental music, since money and skill was required to write books and those lay mostly with the church. What medieval instrumental music we have is mostly in the form of a collection of melodies designed to be repeated in sections and improvised upon. There is a far greater collection of secular songs (often in praise of the Virgin Mary - this had cultish, not sacred associations) and these are often used as the basis for an instrumental piece. Each time the verse or refrain came back you would alter the arrangement of the piece, keeping the music interesting by using variation of sound quality not variation of the music. A lot of folk music I've heard is based on similar principles.

There is also a tradition of ornamentation, codes of performance practice for Baroque music. This isn't really improvisation, but an area in which the singers had control over the music. Similarly, in folk music the singer is often expected to embellish the tune.

One of the courses in my department last term was 'Songs and Sagas', investigating the tradition of vocal music in all areas and periods of music. One of the aims of this course was to make more obvious the links between traditional and early music, in terms of esthetic values within the music and the general approach.

The earliest documented polyphony was that of Notre Dame Cathedral and the composers Leonin and Perotin. I think Anonymous 4 have covered some of this material and it is just amazing. It's even better live!
There is a lot of secular vocal pieces, but generally the music was written for one voice to a part, not a full choir. The genre 'ars subtilitor' is so melodically complex that the effect wuld be lost using a large choir. Similarly motets (a song with different words to each part,literally meaning 'many words') would lose their sense if there were too many voices and as a result the words in each part were not clear.
 
  
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