Which sounds like an excuse for certain "Michael Jackson" approach to Early
Music.
Unrewarding, both visually and musically.
RT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Wheeler" <[email protected]>
To: "Ron Andrico" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2012 9:08 AM
Subject: [LUTE] Re: Saturday quotes
Reading this I can't help but feel that you are pressing for an aesthetic
that is more a reaction to our modern world than one that reflects a
possible 16th century cultural atmosphere....
Check out this excellent article by Liz Kenny...
"The uses of lute song: texts, contexts and pretexts for ‘historically
informed’ performance" Early Music 2008/02
Here us a bit of the opening..
"Our enthusiasm for printed sources has obscured other ways of approaching
these songs, and has artificially divided them from the songs of the next
generation. What looks like a perfect balance on paper may or may not have
remained so when the songs were performed, and the seductive solitude
evoked by a book to be kept and treasured at home may not have always
represented composer ‘intentions’, if indeed we can separate these from
performer intentions. The ‘miniaturist aesthetic’ of privacy, secrecy and
the ‘esoteric’ often define this repertory. ‘Iconographical
representations of the lute in performance of instrumental or vocal music
... consist- ently depict a theatre of privacy and solitude ... apart (or
distanced) from public, courtly culture.’ This may have been true of one
group of performers—the most iconogenic—but it ignores what others were
doing in other contexts, very definitely in public."
The end (with lots of interesting stuff in-between....)
"Early 17th-century musicians faced a challenge which their modern
descendents have no trouble recognizing: that of adjusting their personal
creative ambitions to different sorts of audience or consumer demand. This
is not compatible with a philosophy of one ‘right’ or even one generally
preferable style of modern performance based on a careful sifting of his-
torical evidence, if the sift eliminates evidence incom- patible with any
single interpretative thesis. Modern ideas of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are
not always helpful: traces of 17th- century public practice are to be
found in privately circulated manuscripts, while widely available printed
books facilitated solitary music- reading. To illuminate this repertory
from scholarly angles we need not a normative musicology but a more
cheerfully disruptive one: we might then use its tools to sharpen a new
set of interpretive skills. As Robert Spencer said ‘I see nothing
upsetting in that’ "
All the best
Mark
www.pantagruel.de
On Mar 10, 2012, at 5:43 PM, Ron Andrico wrote:
We have posted our Saturday quotes on performing lute songs with no
gimmicks:
[1]http://wp.me/p15OyV-lv
Ron & Donna
--
References
1. http://wp.me/p15OyV-lv
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