On Aug 3, 2013, at 3:15 PM, Dan Winheld <[email protected]> wrote: > The longer this thread continues, the more I feel like I've gone back 45 > years in a time machine.
Severe jet lag? > This is EXACTLY the situation I encountered as a young Classical guitar > student at university all those years ago; and my love of the lute & early > music only compounded the scorn & weirdness reaction. I had long forgotten > that such cold, lifeless, unmusical souls are to be found in academe. Of course, it's not EXACTLY the same, because in the intervening 45 years early music has become an industry, and the opinion of mainstream musical academia in is no longer as important as it used to be. There was a time when leading early music groups would come to Los Angeles to play in churches in concerts arranged by the local early music society. Theyr'e now playing in Los Angeles Philharmonic subscription series. This coming season, you can hear the Venice Baroque Orchestra, Hesperion XXI, and the Akadamie für Alte Musik Berlin in Disney Hall on Sunday evenings a couple of hours after the LA Phil plays there. (And yes, the LA Phil itself has grasped the notion that you don't play Mozart the way you play Rachmaninoff.) These days there are early music programs in unlikely places there was time when anyone would have giggled to imagine early music programs at USC or Indiana University (a friend who did a chemistry post-doctoral stint there in the late 1970's called Indiana a "culture-free environment"), and I'm still trying to get my mind around "Juilliard Baroque." I knew a kid who graduated in piano from Julliard in the mid-1980's who didn't know who Christopher Hogwood was; he was more ignorant of early music than anyone I'd run into at random in the Tower Records classical section. Indeed, the biggest change I see on the horizon is that early music, for so long an experimental field in which performers figured it out as they went along, is likely to become an establishment, in which aspiring performers get received wisdom from university and conservatory teachers. It's likely to change the type of people who go into early music; in the 1950's and 1960's it took an adventurous, questioning mind and a missionary zeal to do it. I won't pretend the early music literacy has filtered down much from the elite levels. My son's cello teacher has yet to betray the least sign of knowing that there have been any changes in music performance in the last half century. I'm looking around for a new teacher... -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
