![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
This study examines the philosophies, values and ethics of Early Music performers who use living musics to inform and enhance their performance styles and techniques. Early Music performers seek to revive lost traditions of performance, relying on spare descriptions and fragmentary evidence. Since the 1950s, several generations of visionary performers have turned to living musical traditions for inspiration and collaboration in the recreation of earlier European repertoires. Early Music specialists who follow this path hold their informants and collaborators in high esteem and treat their beliefs with respect. They often avoid surface aspects of the musics on which they draw, instead favouring large-scale structural features and performance techniques from which they can develop models for their own work. While many have criticized this approach as an appeal to the exotic and as an extension of 19th-century orientalizing projects, few scholarly studies have sought to understand it from the point of view of the musicians themselves. Ethnography in the field of Early Music – in conjunction with the published writings of the musicians – provides a valuable perspective on this living art. Western classical music in general is under-represented in ethnomusicological research and deserves sympathetic, though not necessarily uncritical, ethnographies. Collaborative projects between historical musicologists and ethnomusicologists on the place of past music in the present would benefit both fields.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was read at the May 2003 annual meeting of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology held at the University of Wales, Bangor. I would like to express my gratitude to those who provided encouragement, valuable criticism and feedback on this and other drafts, especially Wendy Gillespie and Jennifer Ryan. Benjamin Bagby offered helpful clarification of his own philosophical positions in private correspondence. Joel Cohen and Angela Mariani served the dual capacities of informants and respondents, graciously supplying extensive interviews at the beginning of the project and equally beneficial critique and feedback at the end.
Notes
1. In 1895, Sir John Stainer presented a paper on DuFay songs in the important manuscript Ox. Bod. Canonici misc. 213. Finding the singers of his day ill-equipped to sing such music, he arranged to have some of the songs performed on violas (Leech-Wilkinson Citation2002, 23–6).
2. The term “Early Music” is notoriously slippery and imprecise. For the purposes of this study, I use it broadly to refer to Western European musics before the Classic Era (roughly before 1750) and more particularly with respect to modern performance traditions that seek to recover and employ earlier modes of performance contemporaneous with, and appropriate to, the repertoires at hand. Furthermore, I contrast “Early Music” with “classical music”, another problematic term but one which serves adequately to refer chronologically to Western “art” and elite sacred musics from roughly 1700 to the present and semantically to those repertoires stressed in the modern conservatory, music department and school of music, and which feature heavily in large-scale concert performance and public mass media programming.
3. The origin of this belief in continuity and preservation in traditional musics is not always clear, yet it is a common trope among many performers of medieval music, as well as some practitioners of these traditional musics themselves.
4. Thomas Binkley trained first as a guitarist and musicologist. With Sterling Jones, Andrea von Ramm and Nigel Rogers, he formed the Studio der frühen Musik – also known as the Early Music Quartet – in the late 1950s to explore and perform medieval music. After more than a decade of performing and recording, he joined the faculty of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, and in 1977 joined the choral department of the School of Music at Indiana University, where he eventually formed the Early Music Institute. For a survey of Binkley's career and an assessment of his impact on the world of Early Music, see Lasocki (Citation1995; see also Cohen and Snitzer Citation1985). For Binkley's rather substantial discography, see Roberge (Citation2003).
5. In preparation for this study, I conducted telephone interviews in April 2003 with Joel Cohen, Catherine Hawkes and Angela Mariani, and I corresponded by email with Benjamin Bagby. In some cases these interviews were supplemented by more informal conversations and correspondence. Further exchanges followed as I prepared the material for publication.
6. The literature on the subject of authenticity in performance is extensive and often heated. See especially Kenyon (Citation1988) and Taruskin (Citation1995). For a recent assessment and critique, especially with respect to the matter of “Arabisms” in Early Music, see Haines (Citation2001) and Cohen (Citation2000).
7. Specialist literature within the field, however, is extensive and wide-ranging. See especially Chancey (Citation2001) for a broad and useful overview of current approaches to Early Music by performers who employ contemporary musical traditions and practices to inform and complement period performance.
8. Nevertheless, audience perceptions and expectations of the didactic function and value of Early Music concerts should not be discounted nor should the awareness by the performers of the role they play in this aspect of the listener's musical experience. (See further below.)
9. This philosophy may also be a product of the truth-centred nature of historical studies in the days before postmodernist relativism. As one scholar-performer indicated to me, before the authenticity debates Early Music specialists, including himself, truly believed that the sound world of the past could and should be faithfully reproduced. See also Haines (Citation2001).
10. Sequentia director Benjamin Bagby provides a useful description of “historically informed performance”, while at the same time laying bare the problem facing all performers of medieval music: “Regardless of the historical period that interests us, the concept of ‘historically informed performance’ thrives on the conviction that today's performers can find knowledge and instruction in the documentation that has survived from past musical practices: musical notation, descriptions of performance situations, treatises, methods, visual representations of music-making, playable instruments, etc. Unfortunately, all this documentation, which we performers assiduously devour and study, is still missing the one crucial element of musical performance that we most need and desire: the actual sound, the presence of a living master. Barring the discovery of time-travel, we shall never meet our master” (Bagby Citation2002).
11. On the issue of the prescriptive value and reliability of the surviving musical documents and sources, see especially Binkley (Citation1992). Benjamin Bagby, erstwhile Binkley protégé, has voiced similar reservations both in his teaching and in his published writings.
12. The matter of vibrato-less singing emerged frequently in online discussions in the mid to late 1990s on the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.early (also known by its Listserv name “EarlyM-L”), generating much heat and no fewer than three large-scale debates, dubbed the “Wobble Wars” (WWI, WWII and so forth) by Joel Cohen.
13. The students in the coaching session would later become the ensemble Altramar, which specializes in music of the later Middle Ages, especially monophonic song and dance music.
14. Joel Cohen recalls that around 1975 Binkley told him “his goal was to reconstruct, as closely as possible, the first performance of a given piece” (private correspondence). Cohen suggests that Binkley appears then to have changed his perspective over the course of the intervening years, or else that he adopted this contrasting stance for strategic purposes, a defensive manoeuvre in response to criticism of his earlier authenticist position (see also Cohen and Snitzer 1985). The nature of Binkley's reply to his students may also be a product of his role as teacher rather than performer.
15. See, for instance, Leech-Wilkinson (2002, 64–6 on “The Oriental Hypothesis”, passim; Haines 2001).
16. For instance, Chris Norman, who played Renaissance flute with the Baltimore Consort for many years, maintained a parallel career (which continues) playing traditional Celtic, Appalachian and Cape Breton music, especially with the ensemble Helicon, and he played flute for the ceilidh scene in the movie Titanic. See also his liner notes to the Baltimore Consort's The Mad Buckgoat: Ancient Music of Ireland. David Greenberg, a former Early Music Institute student and Baroque violinist with Tafelmusik and his own ensemble Brandywine Baroque, plays traditional fiddle music from Cape Breton (Greenberg Citation2002). Joel Cohen's collaborative projects are discussed later in this paper.
17. See Chancey (Citation2001) for a survey of some of these groups and a sampling of their approaches, which sometimes involve generic collaboration and crossover.
18. Patricia O'Scannell of the Terra Nova Consort takes perhaps the most extreme stance: “I know there are still those who feel that traditional music has only a limited benefit in the interpretation of early music, but I would posit that it is the only source available to modern musicians that can actually be relied upon. Traditional music is the most conservative and unchanging music on the planet” (quoted in Chancey Citation2001, 25).
19. Discussions of medieval music often turn to the reportedly capacious memories of medieval performers and the role memory played in the construction and reconstruction of large-scale lyric genres, such as the epic, romance and lai. On memory in the Middle Ages, see Yates (Citation1964, Citation1966), Carruthers (Citation1990) and Carruthers and Ziolkowski (Citation2002). For issues of music and memory, see Benjamin Bagby's comments on his performance of Beowulf in Chancey (Citation2001, 27–8).
20. Note, however, in the quotation that follows the priority given to quality (“the performer's instinct”) over linguistic and cultural concerns. Note also Cohen's attention to interiorization of the language (“‘music’ of modern dialects”). Such linguistic internalization (and subsequent characterization of language as music) will play an important role in Benjamin Bagby's approach to the narrative epic.
21. See also Cohen's remarks on his four trips to Morocco for his Cantigas de Santa María project: “To my initial surprise, I felt like I was coming home to a part of myself” (Cohen Citation2002, 27). Geographic place, then, also plays a role in the preparation process. See below on the importance of regionalism in establishing performance criteria.
22. Bagby is a prolific commentator on his own work and has on a number of occasions and in various sources provided a detailed account of his unique approach. See in particular Bagby (Citation1999, Citation2000, Citation2002). Altramar singer and harpist Angela Mariani, who has studied with Bagby and Thornton, praises Sequentia's technique and credits Bagby and Thornton with having had an influence on her work comparable to that of Binkley (personal conversations and interview 2003).
23. He also notes that the melodies themselves are little changed over this span of time, indicating an element of conservatism to this aspect of their performance.
24. With the very important exception of Gregorian chant. In a groundbreaking study, The sound of medieval song: Ornamentation and vocal style according to the treatises (Citation1998), Timothy J. McGee makes the convincing argument that medieval music treatises are a treasure trove of interpretative description and, read with care, can yield detailed directions for singing chant.
25. The Shakers with whom Cohen collaborated even supplied a brief history of their community for the liner notes to the recording Simple Gifts: Shaker Chants and Spirituals (Cohen Citation1995, 9–10). Cohen notes, however, that the claims of his collaborators “are not generally verifiable or falsifiable on purely scientific grounds. They do however have some degree of plausibility, and they do generate useful hypotheses for contemporary performance practice” (private correspondence).
26. Italics indicate Cohen's vocal emphasis.
27. The liner notes to Cohen's Cantigas recording with Camerata Mediterranea feature a perhaps ironically intended photograph (1999, 46) of Rachid Lebbar and Joel Cohen playing together much in the manner of the musicians in the manuscript illuminations (a detail of which appears on p. 2 of the liner notes).
28. See, for example, Altramar's Iberian Garden: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Music in Medieval Spain (1997–8), Ensemble Alcatraz's Cantigas de Amigo – Songs for a Friend: 13th-Century Galician-Portuguese Songs & Dances of Love, Longing & Devotion (2000), Alla Francesca's Cantigas: Chants à la Vièrge d'Alfonso X “El Sabio” XIIIe Siècle (Citation2000) and Sinfonye's Poder á Santa María: Andalucía in the “Cantigas de Santa María” of King Alfonso X “el Sabio” (1221–1284) (Citation1994).
29. See also Cohen (Citation2002, 27, 40), where he relays the same story.
30. It is outside the scope of this study to examine the views and perspectives of those who collaborate with or serve as inspiration for Early Music performers. Such studies would be a valuable contribution to new global perspectives in the field of ethnomusicology.
31. Haines, however, discerns the use of microtonal modes on recordings of the Abdelkrim Orchestra (Haines Citation2001, 371–2).
32. Harmonia is Mariani's own syndicated Early Music programme, produced at WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, and distributed by National Public Radio.
33. Cf. Harry Haskell's assessment that the Studio had “revolutionized the interpretation of medieval monophonic music … by applying improvisatory techniques derived from Middle Eastern folk music” (Haskell Citation1988, 165, quoted in Haines Citation2001, 371). Binkley's rejection of the term “improvisation” raises questions about the standard view of the Studio's use of the techniques they developed as a consequence of their visit to Morocco. Also, the characterization of the Andalusian music as “folk music” is inappropriate. It is court music and, though traditional in a certain sense, would better be understood as classical (as Haines himself accurately refers to it in the subsequent paragraph).
34. Mariani insists that the term “Radio Baghdad” was used affectionately rather than derisively and she is not certain whether Binkley ever heard it. She also believes that the term is indicative of the inability of Western listeners to distinguish among various types of Middle Eastern and North African music (Mariani interview Citation2003).
35. On the other hand, his assertion that for the Studio “Arabic music was used … as a pretext to revive orientalism” (Haines Citation2001, 375) seems unfair and perhaps unwarranted. Binkley's goal was to make good music, as he demonstrated in his comments to Altramar (above).
36. Haines in fact addresses the structural aspects of the Studio's performances, highlighting the increasing importance of preludes, interludes and postludes over the course of their recording career (Haines Citation2001, 374–5), but then he dismisses these fundamental features as “Arabic graftings” (ibid., 375). Note Binkley's comments above about personalizing the adopted models.
37. It is important to remember here that Cohen, like Binkley, worked and studied with Moroccan musicians, so his assessment is based on personal experience. See Cohen (Citation2002).
38. Whether or not these techniques share a common foundation or only feature surface similarities is well beyond the scope of this study and ultimately of little relevance to an examination of the performers’ motives and justification.
39. Some do, however, express a concern for accessibility. Altramar, according to Mariani (interview 2003), employs staging in their concerts that has no foundation in medieval practice. The notion of a concert itself is an anachronism, as is the sort of groupings of pieces used in many programme (juxtapositions of sacred and secular musics, for instance).
40. In fact, such collaboration had happened earlier – albeit in the context of a 1977 academic symposium – and between none other than the Studio der frühen Musik and the Abdelkrim Rais Orchestra of Fès (Haines Citation2001, 377, n. 31). Cohen, however, does appear to be the first to attempt a coherent, holistic blend of the traditions.