Period Performance and Early Instruments

1
Period Performance and Early Instruments

• 1. Connects with all the issues raised by
  Performance as discipline lecture.
• History of Early Music Revival.
• Early Instrument Industry.
• Instruments or Voices in Medieval Music.

2
Early Music Revival

• Music Revival goes back to Mendelssohns 1829
  revival of Bachs St Matthew Passion and of his
  revivals of oratorios by Handel and Hadyn.  
• The Idea that before the 19th Century People were
  only interested in music that was contemporary is
  not really true. The Academy of Ancient Music
  related to the Academy of the 18th London that
  aimed to maintain Corelli and Handel.
• Handels Messiah has been performed ever since it
  was written. Eighteenth Century Musicologists
  like Hawkins knew a lot about Renaissance Music
  and Medieval Music and were able to enlighten
  others.  
• Bach and Handel Societies in both England and
  Germany flourished in many provincial towns and
  cities and fuelled the choral traditions in
  those countries. 

3
Brussels Instrument Museum

• The Development of Instrument Museums and the
  playing of old instruments (Brussels and the
  Fetiss Historical Concerts in the 1880s and
  90s).
• Brussels concerts on original instruments heard
  by Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940) family tradition
  of instrument tuning, mending and playing
  especially of Bachs 48.

4
Dolmetschs Legacy

• The apostle of retrogression instrument maker,
  performer, polemicist, scholar and teacher.
   Played all the instruments and believed in going
  back to primary sources.
• Early Music and the Arts and Crafts Movement.
  The personal connection with William Morris and
  his emphasis on craftsmanship, do-it-yourself and
  the grow your own earthiness traditions.
• Haslemere, The Dolmetsch Family, the festival,
  recordings and BBC connections.
• Recorder movement in schools.

5
Elizabethan Fever in the Edwardian Era

• Edmund Fellowes and madrigals/lute songs
  (co-inciding with revival of English composition
  Elgar and VW).
• Revival of Tudor Church Music of the Oxford
  Movement and Surpliced choirs in all parish
  churches).
•  Co-incided with period when Britain was
  convinced of its superiority and empire at its
  height.

6
Interwar Years and the Spread of Ideas

•   Interwar Years The Schola Cantorum
  Basiliensis, Schola Cantorum of Paris Schools
  starting up dedicated to reviving Early Music
  close connection with academics. Schools in
  Germany in 1920s dedicated to particular
  instruments, e.g. Lute .
• Modern composers rediscover Early Music
  (Stravinsky, Hindemith, Busoni and Others) 
• American Renaissance (Dolmetsch and Landowska in
  America). Hindemith at Yale. New York Pro
  Musica.  
• Thurstan Dart and the scholar musician.

7
1960s and Post War Generation - Flambouyant
Performers

• !960s and gathering pace of Baroque Opera
  Revival. Baroque dance and stagecragt
  resurrected.
• Alfred Deller and the Countertenor renaissance.
   
• Early music Subcultures Noah Greenberg, David
  Munrow, Gustav Leohardt.
• Amateur factor. Industry started with followers
  and groupies
• Early Music in Japan, Eastern Europe,
  Scandinavia.

8
1980s and Beyond

• Beethoven, Brahms and Beyond Classical and
  Romantic Music on Period Instruments. Influence
  on Concert Programming, Musical Education and
  Recording Industry.  
• Historical Performance The Dominant Musical
  Ideology of Our Time. Affecting the way modern
  classical performers play e.g. the erosion of
  acceptance of vibrato
• But also questioning of the preoccupation with
  the past.

9
Post 1980s ideas - Instruments or Voices

• Idea that the use of instruments in medieval
  music is always questionable very little of the
  notation is intended for instruments and before
  the 15th centuries instrumentalists would not
  have been musically illiterate. English a
  capella heresy
• Questioning of the need for authenticity as it
  is unobtainable anyway - and banning of the word.
  

10
Harry Haskels book on the Early Music Revival

• Authenticity is of course the nub, the central
  issue, the very raison detre of the early music
  movement. In a sense, the history of the
  movement is the history of the search for
  authenticity or more accurately, the history of
  changing concepts of authenticity in the
  performance of early music. A distinction must
  now de drawn between the early music revival, as
  that umbrella phrase has been rather loosely used
  so far in this book, and what has come to be
  called the historical performance movement.
  Clearly many of the musicians associated with the
  revival of early music and instruments have had
  little or no interest in historical modes of
  performance. Only recently has the attitude
  expressed in Landowskas famous remark you play
  Bach your was, Ill play Bach his way gained
  general acceptance among early musicians.
  Haskell, p.175