What can early composers teach us?

[Marius Amado-Alves]

Topic for discussion: What can early composers teach us?

Here is a compostion by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1370) called Je Vivroie Liement. We should write as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntSZMPI4qIQ

—Comment by Fredrick zinos on January 27, 2009 at 12:01am

[Marius Amado-Alves]

A lot!

But I always have this reservation about these pieces, that much of it is not the original score, but a very artistic interpretation of it, by the ensemble directors or other exegetes. Because... have you looked at those original "scores"? Impossible to read for a "normal" musician. Lots of ambiguity, or simply no clue at all. *Scholars* group indeed :-)

The above act sounds like the director is a Jethro Tull fan :-)

Now bump a couple centuries, that's another story, you get accurate scores from Vivaldi, Bach...

[Chris Alpiar]

Nice video, that was fun to watch. But yea, are we actually learning from early composers? lol

[Kristofer Emerig]

I've contemplated this issue often, like when listening to "reconstructed" renditions of music of Alfonso El Sabio, et al. I think they've got the general point of the composer's intent, but some of it sounds unauthentic to me, imbued with some hue of modern musical style. It's comparable to scholars trying to determine what ancient spoken Latin or Greek sounded like, without coloring their determination with some modern phonetic bias. With erudite scholarship, I'm sure they can triangulate a good approximation, but we never really know with certainty, do we?

Even some work attributed to Bach is reconstructed or at least has differing interpretations of the MS. He should have been a doctor.