The Baroque Violin & Viola

The Early Music revival has had far-reaching consequences on how music of the past is performed, both by specialists and non-specialists. This timely book is a practical step-by-step course of lessons for violinists and violists in both these categories, covering the interpretation, technique, culture, and historical background of the Baroque violin repertoire. Written by a violinist and teacher specializing in Baroque music over many years, it guides readers from the basics (how to hold the violin) to Bach, via music from a wide variety of styles. Avoiding obscure musicological jargon, it is eminently readable and accessible. Packed with information, detailed observations on the music under discussion, and relevant quotations from historical and contemporary sources, it covers everything the Baroque violin student should know and may be considered the equivalent of two to three years of individual lessons. The book contains over 100 exercises devised for and tested on students over the years. The author’s holistic approach is evident through the exercises aimed at bringing out the individual voice of each student, and his insistence that what happens within, the identification and manipulation of affects, is a vital part of successful performance. Imitating the voice, both spoken and sung, is a constant theme, beginning with the simple device of playing words. There are fifty lessons, including five Ornamentation Modules and ones on specific topics: temperament, rhetoric, the affects, and so on. All the music, transcribed for both violin and viola, is downloadable from the website, where there is also a series of videos.

Critical Reflections on the Operatic Canon

This chapter looks back at the core canon in opera, tracing its evolution and mutation during the half century when its author served as a professional critic and then festival director. The chapter sees the core canon as either fixed or shrinking over the last ninety years. The public’s resistance to Modernist dissonance led to an explosion of repertory in areas immediately outside what had been the traditional canon. The need for novelty has been sated by directorial innovation (Regietheater), the early music revival (with George Frideric Handel the principal operatic beneficiary), and the ceaseless search for new curiosities to revive from the past. Moreover, the operatic canon has been enlarged by lighter forms of musical theater (West Side story and Sweeney Todd) and also by influence from non-Western cultures bearing their own canonic traditions and repertories. This chapter is paired with Kasper Holten’s “Inside and outside the operatic canon, on stage and in the boardroom.”

Medieval Folk in the Revivals of David Munrow

This article explores the close relationship between medievalism, orientalism, and folk music in the work of early music revival pioneer David Munrow, director of the Early Music Consort of London from 1968 to 1976. The focus of this study is his last television work Ancestral Voices, a BBC series exploring myths and legends surrounding early instruments and tracing those associations through history. It also examines other popular genres prevalent on British television at the same time and suggests that through a focus on a constellation of myth, medievalism, and foreign ancestry, Ancestral Voices demonstrates a significant cultural allegiance to other key 1970s works.

Music in museum (second half of 20th century, Ukraine)

Due to the process of early music revival, started in the USSR from the 60s of the 20th century, there are searches of the appropriate premises, in which early music could be perceived naturally, where one can feel a single style in combination of rooms, music, instrumentation and performance style that would increase the perception of each of the components of the creative process. Such most suitable premises are found out to be the halls of museums — former mansions, or palaces, which serve as museums in our time. The practice of conducting concerts in museums was introduced in Western Europe in the first half of the 20th century as a part of the overall process of early music revival and became an example for other countries including Ukraine.The Museum of Ukrainian Fine Arts was one of the first museums where concerts of early music were held in 1988. The concert programs featured the music of prominent Ukrainian composers of the 16th–18th centuries. Since 1989, the «Concerts in Museum» began to be held at the Museum of Russian Art, where one could hear music from the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century from «The Music Collection of the Razumovsky Family». Since 2003, the door has opened for concerts at the National Museum of History of Ukraine, where, in addition to chamber music, the visitors watched the whole performance — the chamber opera by D. Bortniansky «Sokil». The performance of this opera was also held at other museums of Ukrainian cities, as well as in Poland.Ancient instruments in some museums, that have lost its sound and artistic qualities, attracted attention of the musical experts. In association with scholars and the administration of museums, restoration work was carried out and brought back the old tools to life, which made it possible to hear the true «voice of the past «. This happened from the pianoforte at the Museum of Ukrainian History, the Lesia Ukrainka Museum in the village Kolodyazhny of Kovelsky District in Volyn and the Memorial Museum of Maxim Rylsky in Kyiv. Nowadays many museums in Ukraine have become centres of culture, both visual and musical. Due to this process, contemporaries’ views about the past art have expanded, the recordings of ancient music phonograms initiated film-making.

The Death and Second Life of the Harpsichord

Though far from being the only historical instrument to receive renewed attention during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, the harpsichord holds a special place in the history of the early music revival. No other instrument played as visible—or, perhaps, as controversial—a role in popularizing musical activities during the revival. As a large and visually distinctive presence, the harpsichord has a tendency to garner attention wherever it appears, whether in a museum case or on the concert hall stage. In this article I explore the harpsichord’s nineteenth-century “death” and its subsequent revival—the two periods of its history that have been most neglected. By reexamining the ways in which the harpsichord was portrayed in both words and images, I show that the instrument’s eventual acceptance in the twentieth century was far from being a fait accompli but depended largely on an extensive and deliberate renegotiation of both its image and its cultural identity. In the first half of the article I explore the harpsichord’s nineteenth-century existence as an evocative emblem of a vanished past: an instrument turned relic that was frequently laden with supernatural literary tropes and ghostly imagery. In the second section I examine the instrument’s revival, focusing on the ways in which the harpsichord was brought before modern audiences, ultimately in a form that was heavily reengineered and reconfigured. Indeed, in its journey from museum piece to modern musical instrument the harpsichord underwent a marked transformation of both form and character. The process involved a gradual rejection of much of the cultural baggage the harpsichord had accrued during its long dormancy in the nineteenth century and resulted in a transformation that ultimately won it a place in the modern musical world.

The plague, a metal monster, and the wonder of Wanda: in pursuit of the performance style

The claim of having achieved "authenticity" in performance has today almost disappeared without a trace. However, Richard Taruskin's efforts to disprove the premise through a series of articles in the 1980s still beg important questions, such as exactly what are the origins of the early music movement's performance style and which performers had a role in its transmission? Taruskin contends that Stravinsky transmitted the "geometrical," or modernist, Bach to the musical world, and that Stravinsky might have learned it from Wanda Landowska. Taruskin's accolade exposes more than a bit of irony within the early-music revival, since Landowska is seldom, if ever, acknowledged as a significant contributor to the development of the early-music "style" of performance, even though Landowska's recordings reveal a performer with a modern style, one that foreshadows 1980s early-music performances. Due primarily to the sound of her non-historic harpsichord, Landowska's influence, however, has been diminished, and her significant role was negated in the post-"authenticity" early music movement. This paper traces Landowska's central influence through an investigation of her Varsovian musical education, Parisian residency, and recordings. It recognizes and advocates for the contributions made by Landowska before the advent of the "authenticity" era.