What is meant by "early music" and "historical performance?"
The terms Early Music and Historical Performance were coined in the mid-20th century to describe a particular approach to medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music, in which performers focus on the music's original cultural and historical context, including the use of historical period instruments and languages. In other words, Historical performance can be described as an investigation into historical practices of making art. It's not quite the same as "reenactment," but it has some characteristics in common: Early Music performers study the old instruments and the techniques that were used to play them; the ancient notation; the archaic languages; and so on. Every performance is preceded by extensive research into historical instruments, early notation, unwritten improvisatory and ornamental practices, and the historical context of that particular repertoire. We might say instead that Historical Performance is essentially enacted research, in which the fruit of research is the process of creating and executing a performance rather than in an object such as a book or other publication. The art and scholarship of historical performance, and the intellectual and expressive rewards of rediscovering how artists in other eras perceived and responded to their world, occurs precisely at the intersection of ‘creativity’ and ‘scholarship’ which is also sometimes referred to as Arts Practice Research.
The music of the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque eras spans a thousand years, and ranges from plainchant to madrigals; from Renaissance dances to Baroque chamber music; from early American "shape-note" hymns to early colonial Latin American music. Within it, we can hear the musical "roots" of many kinds of later western music: classical, sacred, folk, traditional, and popular. Even rock and jazz, in addition to their significant African-American heritage, sometimes also use western "modal" scales and harmonizations that were handed down to us from medieval times. Improvisation was also an important part of many kinds of ancient western music, leading to the continuing creation of "new" performances of "old" music. It's exciting to discover that in the act of opening this window to the past, we are actually creating "new" and exciting performances of music. It's a constantly unfolding process of musical discovery, for both the performers and the listeners.
The ensemble is open to both singers and instrumentalists, with the understanding that everyone may be called upon to use their voices! Our players mostly use historical instruments (like the viola da gamba pictured at left, and the medieval fiddle or "vielle" pictured above), especially as we continue to have the good fortune to slowly build Tech’s period instrument collection. However, we occasionally will use a modern instrument for practical purposes, if we have no access to its early counterpart. (We never turn away a player just because they've never tried a historical instrument -- the whole point is to learn how!) We have regularly scheduled rehearsal times on Mondays (6-7:30) and Wednesdays (usually instruments, 5-6 and/or 6-7), and Friday (3-4:30). We generally do one whole-group project with at least one major public performance per semester, with occasional additional performances. We also sometimes give performance-demonstrations for local schools.
Here's a quick sample of titles from some of our past programs:
- A Harp of Thousand Strings (Early American hymnody, ballads, and tunes)
- Improvisation and Invention in Medieval Music
- Le Noble Rhétorique: Puzzling Polyphony and Subtle Spring Songs from the Fourteenth Century
- Music for Twelfth Night (in conjunction with the TTU Main State Theatre production)
- Ordo Virtutum (Hildegard von Bingen)
- Songs of Praise and Devotion: Medieval Italian Laude Spirituali
- Dances, Catches and Consorts: Diverse Musick from 17th-Century England
- Music from an English Masque (pictured, right)
- From Malory to Morley: A Renaissance Journey
- Cancionero!
- The “Real” Carmina Burana
- Knights, Maidens and Minstrels: music from medieval France
- Miracles and Mayhem (including one of the Plays of St Nicholas)
- An Evening of Monteverdi
- The Star Shining on the Mountain: A Medieval Spanish Christmas
Click here for a full list of all of our concerts from 2001 to the present.