This also fits in nicely with Richard Taruskin's often stated thesis that early music performance practice today is really a modern fabrication that seeks to apply 20th (now 21st) century aesthetic preferences to past music. Indeed, the technically clean, vibrato-less, metronomic, inexpressive character of many performances of early music nowadays seems to be an artistic reflection of mechanized industrialization, assembly lines, and the repeatable, homogenized regularity of product made possible by the use of computers. It would be too much of a stretch to suggest that the approach of Segovia and contemporaries provides a model of early interpretation today, but one might be able to argue that, being older, some aspects of those aesthetic priorities were (un/subconsciously) closer to the spirit of earlier times than the modern performance dogma. "Ah ha!" says the HIP Police Person, "But the Basel crew has something those bloated philistines of Segovia's generation never deigned to consider: we base every choice upon..." (At this point the HIP Police Person raises eyes and hands to the heavens. A ray of golden light shines down and a snippet of the scholarly edition of Josquin's Missa "Di Dadi," sung by an angelic choir, is heard. Apollo on his chariot begins to descend but he suddenly gets a call on his iPhone reminding him that he is needed for a baroque opera rehearsal in Stockholm.) "...the SOURCES! Aaaaahhhhhh..." the HIP person sighs with quasi-orgasmic relish. To which I say: Read all the 19th century treatises you can. Absorb them. Many are written so clearly, you'll have be able to form a perfect aural picture of how the music sounded. Then listen to period recordings. Suddenly no one is doing they're "supposed" to be doing, according to their own sources! The picture you formed was filtered through your own time, not theirs. How great must the gulf between our current intellectual comprehension and their actual practice be for music created in a pre-industrialized age, from which no recorded artifact survives? Chris Dr. Christopher Wilke D.M.A. Lutenist, Guitarist and Composer www.christopherwilke.com On Wednesday, December 18, 2013 6:46 PM, JarosAAaw Lipski <jaroslawlip...@wp.pl> wrote: WiadomoAAAe napisana przez howard posner w dniu 18 gru 2013, o godz. 23:10: > > On Dec 18, 2013, at 1:47 PM, Dan Winheld <[1]dwinh...@lmi.net> wrote: > >> Is it just me, or is there not something ironic about a serious minded 21st century LUTE-list member finding a great 20th century musical icon (think of him what one will otherwise) "outdated"? > > Not at all. Implicit in the whole early music movement is the assumption that the mainstream classical approach to early music was outdated, including icons like Karajan, Stokowski, and yes, Segovia. Their approach was an early-to-mid-twentieth-century approach that became outdated when we learned better. > Sure, but we're not talking about Segovia's early music interpretations. To get on or off this list see list information at [2]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
-- References 1. mailto:dwinh...@lmi.net 2. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
