I do not feel that I need to defend Christopher Wilke. If I had a substantive question or issue with early music, I would go top Chris way before I would ask any of the "pros" you mention. I would like to take a moment to address the "all pros I heard until now were very good." statement. Perhaps, Ernesto, you should listen more critically or get out more - I have heard some emperors play who had no cloths at all.
Joseph Mayes ________________________________________ From: lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu [lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu] On Behalf Of erne...@aquila.mus.br [erne...@aquila.mus.br] Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2013 7:37 AM To: Christopher Wilke Cc: lute@cs.dartmouth.edu Dmth; howard posner Subject: [LUTE] Re: and the early music movement Christopher, maybe you should start to hear good early music musicians. They all improvise, and are excellent at it. I do not know any recorder, theorbo, cembalo, clarinet, cornetto, etc etc player who does not improvise. They learn it at school, in ensembles, from each other. Take Van Eick, a basic recorder repertoire - full with improvisation. Any Basso Continuo is an improvisation of sorts. On the other hand, all onstage jazz impro's were tried out before in rehearsal. There are very few musicians who do free-impro, total on-the-spot improvisation, onstage. Even Metheny and Coleman's "song x", a timeless masterpiece, is not way out free in the utter sense of free improvisation. Bad early music exists as well. I only hear it from amateurs. All pros I heard until now were very good. A huge number of amateurs is excellent as well. Your comments on early music are very unrealistic. Have you ever been to the Basel conservatoire yourself? Ernesto Ett 11-99 242120 4 11-28376692 Em 20.12.2013, às 20:51, Christopher Wilke <chriswi...@yahoo.com> escreveu: Howard, -------------------------------------------- On Fri, 12/20/13, howard posner <howardpos...@ca.rr.com> wrote: On Dec 19, 2013, at 5:27 AM, Christopher Wilke <chriswi...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> This also fits in nicely with Richard Taruskin's often stated thesis >> that early music performance practice today is really a modern >> fabrication that seeks to apply 20th (now 21st) century aesthetic >> preferences to past music. > This would make sense only if there were a single > 20th-century aesthetic preference. Who is to say there is not? Those alive during a historical period are too sensitive to the trees of plurality to discern the forest of ideology motivating seemingly disparate activities. (I assume most of us on this list are holdovers born in the 20th century. If there are any lutenists age 13 or younger on this list, please feel free to let us know your assessment of the degree of aesthetic cohesion exemplified in artistic movements of the last century. Probably, "Uh, you mean that old stuff? Like, I dunno. Don't care.") > The important thing about "20th-century aesthetic > preferences to past music" is that the 20th century > preferred past music. Audiences turned out for music > of the 18th and 19th centuries more than for the new > stuff. That had never happened before. Hardly. Audiences turn out in droves for new popular music: "product" intended to be enjoyed for a while before being discarded in favor of the next hit. It may come as a shock to us on the list, but very few people in the general population pay attention to classical music at all. We're the oddballs and I'm afraid Beyonce has us lute players beaten by a large margin in terms of broader musical relevance in the present. > Because early musicians spend lots of time in factories???? Yes. In music, they are called "conservatories." >> and the repeatable, homogenized >> regularity of product made possible by the use of >> computers. > I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you talking about > digital recording, or something else? Well, no, I wasn't speaking of digital recording specifically, but that is a new development of the 20th century. While the invention of aural recording and the resultant commodification of the resultant mass-produced product, has certainly had an influence on the way music was performed in the 20th/21st centuries, that is really a much larger topic. I was rather referring to the psychological mindset incurred when one is able to press a button and have 100 identical pages print versus the old school method of one having to manually press 100 similar, yet slightly distinct pages, or the even older method of writing out 100 pages by hand. We expect the characteristics of like objects to be extremely consistent, if not exact. (See the above remark about conservatory training.) There is every reason to believe that earlier generations neither expected or desired total consistency. Indeed, improvisation and ornamentation WERE the expected tools of all professional musicians. Listeners knew that every hearing of a piece would be unique. We, however, expect our MP3s to sound exactly the same on each playing. Our HIP performers are more influenced by the latter than the former. Consider how many early music performers today improvise in concert. Sure, there are some who can do it, but today, despite the fact that we know of its past importance, it is not at all an obligatory skill for HIP musicians. Improvisation means that occasionally you'll have too many notes in a run or find yourself with the next note of that repeated figure just out of reach, or even - oh, the horror! - play a wrong note. Can't have that. Not consistent. A reviewer, still stinging from the backlash resulting from a negative Segovia review, would relish the opportunity to expostulate that sort of informed, yet anachronistic (for 20th century aesthetics) performance. >> It would be too much of a stretch to suggest that the approach of >> Segovia and contemporaries provides a model of early interpretation >> today, but one might be able to argue that, being older, some aspects >> of those aesthetic priorities were (un/subconsciously) closer to the >> spirit of earlier times than the modern performance dogma. > True in a very limited way, insofar as the spirit of earlier > times was "I play the way I play because I like to play that > way; I play the best way I can based on my own inclinations > and the way I was taught to play." You say, "true is a very limited way," which I already noted in saying, "it would be too much of a stretch" to use Segovia et al as a model. Still, I think there are aspects of that approach that are worthy of re-evaluation and possible adoption. Chris Dr. Christopher Wilke D.M.A. Lutenist, Guitarist and Composer www.christopherwilke.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
