Music Of Early Times
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Music Of Early Times
Early music is based mainly on the music of the Medieval, Renaissance and
Baroque eras. Many people like to define Early Music as ending in 1750, with the
death of J.S. Bach. This is a handy date, but it misses the various stylistic
changes taking place around that time, i.e. the emergence of the gallant and
pre-classical idioms in close proximity to the final flowering of the baroque
proper. To add even more confusion, this is also not clear-cut. As with
everything else, Baroque music ended gradually and sporadically, if we are to
say that it ended all. Perhaps the significant factor defining these eras as
“early music” is that they do not have a continuous performance tradition.
In other words, this music ceased to be performed after its time had passed and
needed to be revived in our own era. This is not true of the “classical’
music of Mozart, Beethoven, et al. Which possesses a continuous performance
tradition. This means that, to some degree, it is this revival which dominates
EM (that is, early music as a movement), at least in spirit. Of course, things
are not clear-cut here either. For instance, late Baroque composers like Bach,
Handel, Vivaldi, and etc. Were revived relatively early and therefore have a
fairly long performance tradition which is not dependent on the present early
music movement. Now we are seeing an increasingly large number of performances
of Mozart, Beethoven, and others in the content of early music; this further
muddies the waters. There is the question of pre-Medieval music. While early
musicians would undoubtedly be happy to claim it as their own, unfortunately
there is very little surviving evidence about music from earlier times. Indeed,
there are no music manuscripts from Western Europe at all. However, that
doesn’t stop some people from trying to recreate what might have been heard.
Since music has also been a performance tradition, classical concerts represent
divergences from that tradition, based upon a new look at the original context
of a composition. New composers sometimes talk about capturing the “original
intentions” of an early composer. Although like any essentially psychological
object, these intentions can never be thoroughly concrete. As such, that
decision rests largely with the artistic intuition of the modern performer, and
should be judged on their own musical merits. Occurring mainly because society
today likes the different sound. In the case of pre-Baroque music, there are
real...
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