Music Of Early Times

Early music is based mainly on the music of the Medieval, Renaissance and
Baroque eras. Many people like to define Early Music as ending in 1750, with the
death of J.S. Bach. This is a handy date, but it misses the various stylistic
changes taking place around that time, i.e. the emergence of the gallant and
pre-classical idioms in close proximity to the final flowering of the baroque
proper. To add even more confusion, this is also not clear-cut. As with
everything else, Baroque music ended gradually and sporadically, if we are to
say that it ended all. Perhaps the significant factor defining these eras as”early music” is that they do not have a continuous performance tradition.

In other words, this music ceased to be performed after its time had passed and
needed to be revived in our own era. This is not true of the “classical’
music of Mozart, Beethoven, et al. Which possesses a continuous performance
tradition. This means that, to some degree, it is this revival which dominates
EM (that is, early music as a movement), at least in spirit. Of course, things
are not clear-cut here either. For instance, late Baroque composers like Bach,
Handel, Vivaldi, and etc. Were revived relatively early and therefore have a
fairly long performance tradition which is not dependent on the present early
music movement. Now we are seeing an increasingly large number of performances
of Mozart, Beethoven, and others in the content of early music; this further
muddies the waters. There is the question of pre-Medieval music. While early
musicians would undoubtedly be happy to claim it as their own, unfortunately
there is very little surviving evidence about music from earlier times. Indeed,
there are no music manuscripts from Western Europe at all. However, that
doesn’t stop some people from trying to recreate what might have been heard.

Since music has also been a performance tradition, classical concerts represent
divergences from that tradition, based upon a new look at the original context
of a composition. New composers sometimes talk about capturing the “original
intentions” of an early composer. Although like any essentially psychological
object, these intentions can never be thoroughly concrete. As such, that
decision rests largely with the artistic intuition of the modern performer, and
should be judged on their own musical merits. Occurring mainly because society
today likes the different sound. In the case of pre-Baroque music, there are
really little choices but to attempt to recreate the sound world of the era, in
order to even approach the surviving compositions. Of course, that’s what many”early music” performers are doing, and they are consequently reviving a
vast body of superlative music, which had previously been effectively last to
us. This is, probably, the core of “early music.” Music today has been
influenced much by early music. From a broader perspective, it is also a
thoroughly modern idea that the “composer’s intentions” should matter more
than what a performer chooses to do with the music in front of the composer. In
fact, it has been somewhat facetiously suggested that such an approach is not
the composer’s intention at all. Music is played very different, because
people interpret things differently, which is why music has changed so much over
time. Early music was the start of a great change in sounds. In the beginning,
with early music we can tell that the ideas were mainly from the composer. Over
time, people realized that they can interpret music in many different ways also.

This was the first movement into new music, and I believe that early music will
be played for well past my lifetime. “We live in a time of great changes, a
time of transformation between major eras. Looking into the unsettling, the
unfamiliar, the senselessness of a world taking a dramatic turn towards the
unknown, people get lost and confused. Their fear, their need for survival even,
urges them to look inside for something big, something dramatic, something
inspiring, something that gives them courage to face the unknown and the
strength to shape it.” (Ewen, David, pg.40) Along with a great change, there
was Jazz. The start of the first real American music. With the culture change
from Early, classical music. Many things changed during this time, but mainly
was do to the changing in culture that influenced jazz. Some of the most
accomplished musicians of our time have devoted themselves to a lifelong study
of Jazz or classical music, and few exceptional musicians have actually mastered
both. A comparison of classical Jazz