early music

Early music is commonly defined as European classical music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, sometimes also including the Baroque.

Revival

The general discussion of how to perform music from ancient or earlier times did not become a subject of interest until the 19th century, when Europeans began looking to ancient culture generally, and musicians began to discover the musical riches from earlier centuries. The idea of performing early music more "authentically", with a sense of incorporating performance practice, was more completely established in the 20th century, creating a modern revival that continues today.

Performance practice

In the early-music revival of the 20th century, the concept of historically informed performance—that is, using available documentation and other contextual evidence to recreate as closely as possible the original ways of playing the instruments used in early music—became an important facet of the performance of early musical notation.

According to Margaret Bent (1998,^{[page needed]}), Early music notation, "is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness." Before about 1600, written music did not consistently state which instruments are used when. A century earlier, people who wrote down music did not always specify whether lines of polyphony were to be sung or played on an instrument. Similarly, the notation frequently does not indicate the key in which to play. Accidentals were not necessary.^{[citation needed]} Notations for rhythm go back only to about 1200.^{[citation needed]} There is thus a speculative element to all modern performances of Medieval and Renaissance music. However, Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score, "what modern notation [now] requires [accidentals] would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint" (ibid^{[page needed]}).

See also

• Early Music Network
• List of early music ensembles
• History of music
• Neo-medieval music

Sources

• Bent, Margaret. "The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis" in Judd, Cristle Collins (ed.) (1998). Tonal Structures of Early Music. New York: Garland Publishing. ISBN 0-8153-2388-3.
• Judd, Cristle Collins. "Introduction: Analyzing Early Music" in Judd, Cristle Collins (ed.) (1998). Tonal Structures of Early Music. New York: Garland Publishing. ISBN 0-8153-2388-3.

External links

• Early Music FAQ
  • What is Early Music?
• Ancient Tunes, Young Ears: Teaching Early Music to Kids
• Early MusiChicago - Early Music in Chicago and Beyond, with many links and resources of general interest
• The Waits Website (designed to accumulate and disseminate historical information on Waits, and to advertise the growing number of revival bands, as well as their equivalents throughout Europe).