What should be adapted and what shouldn't when performing / recording Early Music?

[Yaiza Varona]

Early Music recordings we can find today can be mostly divided into two groups: the ones that try to respect the historicism aspect of the piece and those that use it as a musical base on which an actual artwork of any kind can be built. It is generally accepted that the first choice (considered more orthodox) is more desirable, but even still there are always some aspects to be bear in mind.

In Early Music we always face the fact that whatever music is left for us:

1. can be partial (some part was expected to be known by heart and other to be improvised following the common practice of the time)
2. can belong only to human voice or just one instrument, when the performance could have been accomplished by several musicians, also changing staff depending on where it was performed (mainly inside / outside the Church)
3. was thought to be performed exclusively live and with the instruments of the time (so a determinate volume would be expected, maybe some nuances lost as well)

So the question: What should be respected and what should be adapted when performing Early Music? Can a very modern approach to a historic piece be called Early Music as well or should it be considered another genre apart? And where would be the line that divides them both?

Hope I managed to explain myself properly, otherwise please let me know.
Thanks for your time and opinions

[Martha Maria / Dogwood Daughter]

I don't know if this is relevant to this Early Music discussion....is early music UP TO Bach, or does it include Bach? I don't know, but what immediately came to mind for me is that I've always thought Bach would swoon with pleasure if he could hear his keyboard music, especially the Preludes and Fugues, performed on a modern grand piano.
Also, I don't know if this is relevant to your discussion, but thinking of the English ballads, many of them having roots in the period of Early Music, I love to hear them treated as 'electric folk.' In fact, I've been thinking about that as a personal project. I was raised here in the mountains where many of those ballads survived well into the 1900's because of the isolation of the place. I grew up playing them on a dulcimer (both hammered and three or four string lap dulcimers,) but I don't think music has to be or necessarily should be static....rather, it's a living entitty and should be permitted to evolve as does everything else. That doesn't mean, to me anyway, that there's not a place for faithful historic reproduction of early works....there's a place for both evolved and historic performance and I don't think one is 'better' than another.

[Yaiza Varona]

Thanks Martha Maria for your response,

Well I guess any composer of History would kill to have the technology we have nowadays in any aspect. Can you imagine what Bach would have accomplished if had a Grand Piano...or electric light to work more hours at night? And the most important: how would have affected the possibility of recording sound and playing it back. That is the question in many aspects: we now can accomplish much more than they did when that music was written. So, what to use and what to discard?

Yes there is this stream of adapting Early Music to folk music especially, but then my question would remain - how should that be tagged then? Because I guess "electric folk" would miss the historic origin of the tune itself. (Anyway I don´t know precisely on what English Ballads you mention has this tag been applied on, and also what would be the exact origin of those in Early Music?)

Thanks again

[Christopher Sahar]

This should offer some light:

Rick Erickson whom I have taken organ lessons does the Bach Cantatas according to the liturgical year as Bach would have. He uses as much as possible period instruments (if they are suitable for the church's acoustic) but he uses what vocal forces he can get - doesn't get caught up in the debate over one voice per part or not. For quite a few cantatas he needs to flesh out parts because of missing or incomplete parts in the manuscript and he always gets a good continuo player. So there is some amount of re-creation when preparing a Bach Cantata. As Bach was a church musician, I think Rick does a good job approximating what Bach and his contemporaries would have done (in fact what church musicians before and after him would do).

One aspect of "Early music" is that so much of it was extremely functional - far more than today where music is more an entertainment and it is left to the audience to determine the function OR a canon of music where the score is to be respected as much as possible but fulfills a similar purpose "highbrow" entertainment.

A possible modern comparison of the early music treatment of Bach Cantatas would be big band /jazz band arrangement where the actual song is just a framework to build on. For those arrangements with great popularity and highly esteemed, it is preserved. The latter illustrates that there has always been the existence of a musical canon - eg there always have been musical scores preserved as best as possible because they were highly esteemed (think Brumel's Earthquake Mass, the Sequences of Hildegard van Bingen, Mauchaut poetry/music) - the difference being we can preserve music these days at a much higher degree of accuracy.

[Yaiza Varona]

Thanks for the response Christopher

I understand (if I am wrong please correct me) that Rick Erickson was supporting more the more historicist approach to Early Music performance, but I wonder what criterion do you think he would have followed if not performing for Church? The temple is the most likely place to perform Early Music in this orthodox manner, but what if you want to perform outside liturgy?

I also think you just hit the nail in the head by comparing the common practice among Early Music original performers to Jazz performers since one part is written, other part is improvised according to not-written rules (well maybe now for Jazz players but not for EM original performers, even just because they would save paper and ink for the things worth keeping).
Also, I suspect this fact has some connection to the composer / performer role consideration before Romanticism; composers were designers, mathmatically and philosophally trained and respected for his mental work, whereas performers were seen closer to working-class due to the manual nature of his work. Therefore, a composer´s work would be more likely to be kept and the improvising guidelines of performance, not.

In the end, for one reason or another, we are left with only one part of what went one centuries ago, so the question stilll remains on how do we fill in the blanks...

Thanks again for your reply

[Martha Maria / Dogwood Daughter]

I'm thinking about the Playford Dances. Some of those melodies are dated from the 1500s but probably existed in the folk/dance traditions even before then. What I am thinking is that they were committed to paper, but only the melody was. And yet, I've played in a number of Playford Dance Bands (virginal) and all the players improvise and flesh out the entire composition....it's a very free form sort of enterprise, and a whole heck of a lot of fun too! And that's the way it has always been done. Instruments were not specified...whatever was at hand was fine. I know there was one castle that had an organ in a hall that was used for dancing. Probably typically there would have been some wind instruments, maybe a lute, some sort of percussive effects, maybe stomping and handclapping if nothing else was available. As a matter of fact, Kristofer, when you were, at one time, searching for Gregorian chants as possible themes for your compositions, I meant to suggest that you might find the Playford dances of interest. I do believe that a few of them are probably some of the most enchanting melodies ever composed (or are perfect melodies actually 'discovered'.....sometimes I think so....seems like they float by in the atmosphere and the composer's job is to capture them) in the whole of English music.

Yaiza Varona said:

Thanks for the response Christopher

I understand (if I am wrong please correct me) that Rick Erickson was supporting more the more historicist approach to Early Music performance, but I wonder what criterion do you think he would have followed if not performing for Church? The temple is the most likely place to perform Early Music in this orthodox manner, but what if you want to perform outside liturgy?

I also think you just hit the nail in the head by comparing the common practice among Early Music original performers to Jazz performers since one part is written, other part is improvised according to not-written rules (well maybe now for Jazz players but not for EM original performers, even just because they would save paper and ink for the things worth keeping).
Also, I suspect this fact has some connection to the composer / performer role consideration before Romanticism; composers were designers, mathmatically and philosophally trained and respected for his mental work, whereas performers were seen closer to working-class due to the manual nature of his work. Therefore, a composer´s work would be more likely to be kept and the improvising guidelines of performance, not.

In the end, for one reason or another, we are left with only one part of what went one centuries ago, so the question stilll remains on how do we fill in the blanks...

Thanks again for your reply

[Christopher Sahar]

Yes Rick is from the historicist approach. He went to Eastman in the 60's and early 70's when the period performance practice was picking up steam. Yet, knowing Rick personally he is not too rigid with this approach and the historicist approach entails more than a feliticious reproduction. There are issues with tunings and timbre and, often, making the music easier to perform by distancing oneself from the Romantic and early 20th century approach toward articulation and phrasing.

Martha Maria / MarMelodian said:

I'm thinking about the Playford Dances. Some of those melodies are dated from the 1500s but probably existed in the folk/dance traditions even before then. What I am thinking is that they were committed to paper, but only the melody was. And yet, I've played in a number of Playford Dance Bands (virginal) and all the players improvise and flesh out the entire composition....it's a very free form sort of enterprise, and a whole heck of a lot of fun too! And that's the way it has always been done. Instruments were not specified...whatever was at hand was fine. I know there was one castle that had an organ in a hall that was used for dancing. Probably typically there would have been some wind instruments, maybe a lute, some sort of percussive effects, maybe stomping and handclapping if nothing else was available. As a matter of fact, Kristofer, when you were, at one time, searching for Gregorian chants as possible themes for your compositions, I meant to suggest that you might find the Playford dances of interest. I do believe that a few of them are probably some of the most enchanting melodies ever composed (or are perfect melodies actually 'discovered'.....sometimes I think so....seems like they float by in the atmosphere and the composer's job is to capture them) in the whole of English music.

Yaiza Varona said:

Thanks for the response Christopher

I understand (if I am wrong please correct me) that Rick Erickson was supporting more the more historicist approach to Early Music performance, but I wonder what criterion do you think he would have followed if not performing for Church? The temple is the most likely place to perform Early Music in this orthodox manner, but what if you want to perform outside liturgy?

I also think you just hit the nail in the head by comparing the common practice among Early Music original performers to Jazz performers since one part is written, other part is improvised according to not-written rules (well maybe now for Jazz players but not for EM original performers, even just because they would save paper and ink for the things worth keeping).
Also, I suspect this fact has some connection to the composer / performer role consideration before Romanticism; composers were designers, mathmatically and philosophally trained and respected for his mental work, whereas performers were seen closer to working-class due to the manual nature of his work. Therefore, a composer´s work would be more likely to be kept and the improvising guidelines of performance, not.

In the end, for one reason or another, we are left with only one part of what went one centuries ago, so the question stilll remains on how do we fill in the blanks...

Thanks again for your reply

[Kristofer Emerig]

it's a good and often pondered and debated question. Almost too large to address at once, because Early Music spans three major historical eras, as well as vocal, instrumental, etc.

If we focus narrowly on keyboard and lute literature, there are some stark differences between accepted Baroque and Renaissance performance, with Baroque certainly being more clearly defined, if not less versatile. Florid, improvisational ornamentation was expected from the Renaissance musician, but optional in the precise execution. 16th century treatises offer general principles on the manner in which passaggi are substituted for ground melodies, but without (or only a few) specified formulae for ornamentation. How do passaggi and divisions relate to florid ornamentation? - They are treated much the same in Renaissance practice. Optional, but with certain expected guidelines, mostly concerned with preserving continuity with the replaced line. I think Ganassi offers good common sense advice on performance, but little useful to the composer. In brief, I think in the Renaissance literature one has greater latitude for improvisation (or to skip it), but should never alter the intent of the line. Baroque ornamentation is, at least in my understanding, to be played where and how indicated.

I know this addresses only a small part of the topic posted, but I was coincidentally reading some Ganassi last night so I thought I'd toss it out there.

I'll return with thoughts on the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso el Sabio) because, having seen the facsimiles, I have no idea how Ensemble Alcatraz and other EM groups have reconstructed their renditions from the codices at which I've looked.

[Yaiza Varona]

Hi Anne, thanks for replying

Excuse me if I go a little bit off-topic here but I just wanted to explain breifly what I meant about the evolution of instruments for the best.
Instuments have been gradually gaining volume and adding more nuances to their performance, for mentioning two of the most important improvements in luthierie. This makes sense if we observe that they were commited to perform for evergrowing audiences, until music becomes a show by itself and begins to be performed in theatres (same process in human voice would end in the birth of "bel canto" with time, so that it could be heard even from last row). About nuances, it is one of the major improvements that make baroque violin beat old renaissance violas (more reliable about tuning, ability to perform first spiccato...) or piano adding dinamica instead when harpsichord couldn´t. To sum it up, instruments have evolved to suit the demand of performers (only logical I know).

Please don´t get me wrong, the unique timbre of Early Music instruments is wonderful and has no comparison, but I guess in general terms their original performers used to struggle more with them comparatively than us with our equivalents, because again of technology. In fact, when attending to Early Music concerts, one can see how much time performers need to get their "original" instruments ready for playing...and how easyly tuning is lost, or some string breaks...

Maybe I just added information you all already knew but wanted to make this point clear just in case, hope I managed to explain myself right :)

Anne Goodwin said:

the difference being we can preserve music these days at a much higher degree of accuracy.

Hmm . . . I wonder about that. Societies always have conventions and norms. I wonder if we're really any better at preserving music today than was done in the past (and by that, I mean notes on paper). Also, I wonder how much music is changed by changes in society and by the times in which people live? Martha Maria says that she thinks Bach would be thrilled if he could hear his keyboard music performed on a modern grand piano and I would tend to agree; however, having a grand piano or even an electric light as Yaiza mentioned does not necessarily mean that he would have been more prolific or that he would have been a better composer in my opinion. And, who's to say that today's instruments are in any way superior to those that were in existence during Bach's lifetime and before?

What should be adapted and what shouldn't when performing or recording Early Music? I think in terms of performance, it is always best to do what we think the composer most wanted with his or her music. But do the clues lie more in the bit of sheet music that exists, the instruments that were used, or as Christopher discussed, the purposes that the music fulfilled in church and in society back then? I would imagine equal parts of each. In terms of recording early music, I suppose ideally we would go back to the places where the music may have originally been performed in order to try and absorb the atmosphere. Does anyone ever get to do this? It would be an experience, wouldn't it?

[Yaiza Varona]

Thanks Martha Maria

Playford...yes. In fact I wonder whether someone already did some research on how performance of these dances has been kept in your area, quite probably yes and I would love to read that work.
And now this would be too off-topic, but you made me think on how interesting it would be to ask the same questions we are asking to History of Dance....but should be kept in mind for some Early Music reconstructions as well, since some tunes were written for that purpose.


Martha Maria / MarMelodian said:

I'm thinking about the Playford Dances. Some of those melodies are dated from the 1500s but probably existed in the folk/dance traditions even before then. What I am thinking is that they were committed to paper, but only the melody was. And yet, I've played in a number of Playford Dance Bands (virginal) and all the players improvise and flesh out the entire composition....it's a very free form sort of enterprise, and a whole heck of a lot of fun too! And that's the way it has always been done. Instruments were not specified...whatever was at hand was fine. I know there was one castle that had an organ in a hall that was used for dancing. Probably typically there would have been some wind instruments, maybe a lute, some sort of percussive effects, maybe stomping and handclapping if nothing else was available. As a matter of fact, Kristofer, when you were, at one time, searching for Gregorian chants as possible themes for your compositions, I meant to suggest that you might find the Playford dances of interest. I do believe that a few of them are probably some of the most enchanting melodies ever composed (or are perfect melodies actually 'discovered'.....sometimes I think so....seems like they float by in the atmosphere and the composer's job is to capture them) in the whole of English music.

[Kristofer Emerig]

Yep, that's the one. As I said though, his recommendations on ornamentation are more directed at the performer than the composer. Still, a composer can certainly benefit from those guidelines where elaboration of the line is concerned.


Anne Goodwin said:

Kristofer,

Are you referring to Sylvestro Ganassi, as per this link?

http://www.historicalwoodwinds.be/content/hw.asp?menu=i&instr=S...

If not, would you be able to provide more complete reference information? Thanks. :)


Kristofer Emerig said:

it's a good and often pondered and debated question. Almost too large to address at once, because Early Music spans three major historical eras, as well as vocal, instrumental, etc.

If we focus narrowly on keyboard and lute literature, there are some stark differences between accepted Baroque and Renaissance performance, with Baroque certainly being more clearly defined, if not less versatile. Florid, improvisational ornamentation was expected from the Renaissance musician, but optional in the precise execution. 16th century treatises offer general principles on the manner in which passaggi are substituted for ground melodies, but without (or only a few) specified formulae for ornamentation. How do passaggi and divisions relate to florid ornamentation? - They are treated much the same in Renaissance practice. Optional, but with certain expected guidelines, mostly concerned with preserving continuity with the replaced line. I think Ganassi offers good common sense advice on performance, but little useful to the composer. In brief, I think in the Renaissance literature one has greater latitude for improvisation (or to skip it), but should never alter the intent of the line. Baroque ornamentation is, at least in my understanding, to be played where and how indicated.

I know this addresses only a small part of the topic posted, but I was coincidentally reading some Ganassi last night so I thought I'd toss it out there.

I'll return with thoughts on the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso el Sabio) because, having seen the facsimiles, I have no idea how Ensemble Alcatraz and other EM groups have reconstructed their renditions from the codices at which I've looked.

[Kristofer Emerig]

I've heard when Bach first tried the piano, he muttered "dies' ist eines Scheissedreckklavier!" - and stormed out of the room.

Martha Maria / MarMelodian said:

I don't know if this is relevant to this Early Music discussion....is early music UP TO Bach, or does it include Bach? I don't know, but what immediately came to mind for me is that I've always thought Bach would swoon with pleasure if he could hear his keyboard music, especially the Preludes and Fugues, performed on a modern grand piano.
Also, I don't know if this is relevant to your discussion, but thinking of the English ballads, many of them having roots in the period of Early Music, I love to hear them treated as 'electric folk.' In fact, I've been thinking about that as a personal project. I was raised here in the mountains where many of those ballads survived well into the 1900's because of the isolation of the place. I grew up playing them on a dulcimer (both hammered and three or four string lap dulcimers,) but I don't think music has to be or necessarily should be static....rather, it's a living entitty and should be permitted to evolve as does everything else. That doesn't mean, to me anyway, that there's not a place for faithful historic reproduction of early works....there's a place for both evolved and historic performance and I don't think one is 'better' than another.

[Kristofer Emerig]

OK, trying to execute the inverted mordent in an historically correct manner for a given composer or decade might be splitting hairs for some, or very significant, if you're an avid "period" performer. However...

When I saw this topic, it immediately brought to mind Ensemble Alcatraz and their renditions of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Visions and Miracles). While I like the album, and admire their musicianship, I haven't the slightest notion how they extrapolated their performances from the paltry information available concerning 13th century Iberian/Moorish music and the T/E codices, which indicate only lyrics and a single melodic line, notated in neumes which are themselves, somewhat dubious in the interpretation and lacking metric information. This is that critical point where a "reconstructed" performance bleeds over into "re-composed". No matter how great their scholarship, to be frank about it, Ensemble Alcatraz must have actually written most of what they're performing. Here are links to the music and the facsimiles:

http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/visions-and-miracles

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cantigas/facsimiles/