I'm an interested observer of the to-ing and fro-ing on this list, not
a musician but an historian by training, if not a university academic,
though I do teach a bit. So, David's comment caught my attention and
nudged me out of spectator-only mode:
'At my conservatory we had a subject called 'historical
documentation', that could easily
turn into hysterical documentation with a distorted view of the past
if only the readily available sources where used.'
What I thought immediately was how did the giver (s) of the course
define 'historical documentation'? A source is anything that can give
you information about what you are studying, it doesn't necessarily
have to be a written document, however much we love to get our hands
on the same. Once you have your hands on a source, any source, what is
important is how you approach it: what was its purpose, who created it
and why, and on and on, so that we can evaluate its contribution. The
bigger the variety of sources you examine the more detailed the
picture you can envisage and the deeper the analysis you can make (and
we are first and foremost analysts of information). There are
historians who get fixated with certain types of sources which might
be down to their teaching, a particular specialism (and the modern
academic trend for very narrow specialism is worrying), or perhaps
their psychology. Their work can be valuable to other historians, but
as one thread in the cloth. Whilst there may be historians who think
if there are few sources then there isn't much going on (I admit we
aren't as a group quite 100% all sound and sane), most historians
don't think that, but they do know that it makes the job harder; some
relish the challenge. The human race is never inactive, but it is
sometimes a matter of luck whether we have much evidence of what they
were up to.
My own interest is the London Restoration theatre world, possibly
because before university as a mature student I worked in theatre
(costume) and I am an early modernist. My end view is historical
fiction (mad, I know, very hard to sell) and where there is theatre,
there are musicians, and in that period lutes too sometimes. So, I
lurk and squirrel away interesting little snippets and insights, thank
you. In the theatre I most often hung about with musicians (most fun,
less self-absorbed than some thesps, less nerdy than some technicians).
Finally, when the sources are a bit sparse, some, like me who like to
create fiction with fact, get excited because it gives us more scope
for creation (as long as it is ad-libbed from a sound knowledge). The
early Restoration theatre period is an example of this, not so many
direct sources, so you have to grasp every available scrap and use
your knowledge of the wider scene to build a picture.
Sorry to go on, and thanks for the continuing parade.
Karen Hore
Cambridgeshire, UK
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
