Fwd: Re: Music to the Child Ballads

[Monica Cellio]

> I prefer, personally, to use tunes I've
> learned from other people in preference to hitting the pages of
> Bronson.* 

Is this due to some uneasiness in learning from written music, or is
it that you tend to prefer the tunes you hear?  If the latter, I suspect
that you prefer those tunes because they are more likely to have been
modernized.

Cultivating a good ear for period music is difficult.  (And there are
lots of different periods involved to complicate things; "period" is not 
so homogenous as we often treat it.)  We each have a lifetime of modern
music competing with the renaissance music we (probably) only started
listning to recently.  Some modern folk music sounds (to the casual
listener) similar to the renaissance music, so there's a tendency to
be led astray by the modern stuff.

However, there are differences, and to people who've studied music of
our period they're quite obvious.  Unfortunately, the only way to really
get a feel for those differences is to listen, listen, listen.  
Fortunately, libraries these days often have CDs, so you don't have to 
spend huge amounts of money on this.

Ellisif