At its heart, the specialisation of Early Music is a revisiting and questioning of the way we do things in "Classical" Music. Much of what is commonly known as Classical Music (which I call modern...) is the weird tradition of hand-me-down knowledge and technique... much like a game of Chinese Whispers... it has gotten a little bit off-track at some point, but we still keep doing the same things thinking that we had an unbroken tradition.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and interestingly enough, much of the departure from what was "real" came about in the mid to late 20th century! So quite recently... and it is a bit of a debate as to why this happened, but I think that the quest for perfection in recordings and the lowest common denominator measures for quantitively measuring "ability", combined with a globalisation of style meant that we started to really highly emphasise things that didn't matter and ignore and lose things that really did matter!
So, pre mid-20th century... Classical music shared much of the SAME technical and musical DNA as every other type of music... a flexibility of rhythm, technique, interpretation, improvisation, and ensemble "togetherness" that still exists in jazz, pop, folk, and pretty much every other form of music... AND that existed all the way through to the mid 20th century, and we have recordings and writings to prove it! In fact, many of the old masters from that time would never pass into a common conservatorium... because they didn't prize the things that are now considered to be "good playing".
That isn't to say that we should ditch those things either... but they are of much less importance than what they are now held to be.
Anyway, Early Music started as a Baroque thing... then expanded out to Classical, and has more recently been pushing through to the Romantic and later eras. Reclaiming and re-informing musicians (who bother questioning... most don't...) with concrete evidence about what might have been. The squeaky door avant-garde music that came into being from the separation of Classical music with the rest of society... well, the modern players can keep that!
... and in no surprise, much of this "later" music... that modern musicians still claimed to have a right of interpretation over... well, we know full well that the styles have been perverted into something completely at odds with the original intent.
One of the more interesting pieces of documentary evidence that we have from this period are PIANO ROLLS! Mechanical reproductions of some of the greatest pianists of the generation... and it is quite eye opening as to what they prized and what they didn't! In the coming month, I will be playing alongside an old piano roll of a Chopin piano concerto... its going to be weird to play as part of an "orchestra" accompanying a long dead pianist... but also quite interesting as well!
But that means restringing up an instrument with guts... I can't use my usual Baroque Viola... it is to cumbersome for this type of music, with a fingerboard that is too short and fat. So, I'm reworking this modern viola... not exactly the right fit, but it will have to do for the moment. But I do have an appropriate bow for the era!
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