minstrel: Re: Early music cut off?

[Frederick Joseph Ross]

On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Tadhg O Cuileannain wrote:
> I think early music has more to do with the intent to play the music in
> a historically authentic way.  It started with baroque and earlier, but
> now there are people who play Mozart on authentic period instruments and
> I've even heard of a recording of Debussy being done with an authentic
> "period" 1890s piano...

This is actually a very important concept.  The piano of Mozart's day was
a small, light instrument, and the violins hadn't yet undergone the
transformations of the nineteenth century.  Chin rests didn't come in
until the end of the nineteenth, and world war one ushered in metal
strings instead of gut, and with it the continuous vibrato style of
playing.  Part of this movement is a backlash against the continuous
vibrato, which Leopold Auer compared to spiking your entire dinner with
tabasco sauce.  Interestingly, new string developments today are focused
on synthetics that sound and feel closer to gut but last the way metal
does.

Early music is probably a misnomer.  "Period performance" is another term
I've heard, but the Baroque strings, the gamba ensemble, the Baroque
opera, and the rest at school remain the Early Music Ensemble.  This is
rather like a nuclear physicist calling what he spends his day dividing an
atom.  The movement started with early music, and kept moving forward.
Maybe in a hundred years we'll have people with steel strung instruments
and continuous vibrato who specialize in period performance of Webern and
Schoenberg!

Enough rambling.  Happy New Year, everyone.

Gian Filippo da Cremona