Genie wrote: > >When did the drive for truly historical recreation really take off? > > >As I understand it in the music world, performers only started > >trying to play "as it was originally/meant to be played" within the > >last 20 to 25 years. > > >Is that also true for costume?
Suzi replied: > Not true in England. Early music was being played on original > instruments when I was singing in the 60's. A gentleman called > Thurston Dart, I believe, was instrumental (pun intended) in bringing > "the real thing" to a wider audience. (Even then, it was not a very > wide audience - I was privileged to see and hear some rather special > early music people, including David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood of > the Early Music Consort.) However, there's apparently a distinction between "playing on period instruments" and "identifying and replicating period performance practice." My husband, who knows much more than me about early music, was explaining this to me just the other night, and said that the move to understand historical performance practice was something he became aware of in, hmm, the early 1980s I think. So that would be 20-25 years ago. (And he was living in England then.) Before that, he said, the key attribute of early music performance was simply the use of period instruments. There's apparently much more to it than that now. I'm not a musician, but I do recall seeing a surge in sessions on "performance practice" in the music tracks at the Medieval Congress in the last couple of decades. Interestingly (and getting back to Genie's question), as part of this same conversation, my husband and I were discussing changes in the understanding of historic costuming in that same period, and the redefinition of workmanship quality (in some circles) from what was then accepted as generically good practice (e.g. neat stitching, seam finishing) to an attempt to understand and replicate the qualities that were important to seamsters in a specific period -- which isn't necessarily what we value now. Pattern matching is one example of a workmanship issue that has changed in perceived value over the centuries. Another that comes up a lot in my lectures is the mechanics of gore insertion; modern costumers often place a lot of priority on having sharply pointed gore tops that lie perfectly flat, but I can't think offhand of a single extant example that does this; they all have folds, pleats, gathering, rounded or squared-off tops, or other hedges that would be logical ways to simplify the insertion and possibly increase flexibility. A modern reproduction that replicated those characteristics would be closer to known period practice, but probably score lower for workmanship in many competitions. --Robin straying back on-topic _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
