On Oct 9, 2006, at 5:03 AM, Francesco Tribioli wrote: > This is an interesting phenomenon: actually the quality of the music > and the quality of the performance are absolutely unimportant. No > one knows > who is Dowland, no one knows what a good performance of this music > is but > the name of pop star is enough to sell a piece of junk (IMHO) as > this CD > like the bread. It is considered a musical event, while CDs > recorded by > specialized lutenists and singers pass completely ignored! There is > something wrong in all this... Nowadays what sells is the name not > the music.
I'll tell you another interesting phenomenon. The HIP purists in the early-music community, who set themselves above the commercial mainstream believing in effect that only others from their particular world are competent to critique what they do, are nevertheless very quick to stand in judgement over what goes on in the commercial mainstream when they think that their own blinkered little world may be affected by it in some way. Those who claim to know what is "authentic," and who see themselves as the sole arbiters of taste in early music, would do well to consider what happened the last time their oh-so-precious historical principles were applied for real, back in the days when they weren't history, when the "old ones" were still the current ones: the lute died. We don't want it to die again. Poke fun at Sting if you want to, but consider that you might not hear that question, "what's a lute?" quite so often any more. I have a great deal of respect and love for the lute, and I recognize the value of all the research that has been done in order to bring it back from the dead. But I also feel that it is inevitable that we are bound to re-invent the lute in the modern world. Otherwise, what is the point of the 20th-century lute revival? Simply to amass information for its own sake? Or satisfy the whims of a few heads-in- the-sand purists? Perhaps, but if Sting can bring the lute to a wider audience than we can, then he has succeeded where we have failed. David R [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.rastallmusic.com -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
