Emma Kirkby sings the way she does because she was a product of the English
Cathedral choral tradition and does or did emmulate the sound that English
choirboys make and are assumed to have made in the past. Whether this is
the case is hard to tell but I have heard recordings of the Sistine Chapel
Choir and the Choir of Westminster Cathedral made at the beginning of the
20th century and the tone that the boys made was not unlike that of English
choirboys today.
I don't see where Joan Baez comes into it myself.
----- Original Message -----
From: "howard posner" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2013 6:54 PM
Subject: [LUTE] Re: Bream Collection... I
On Dec 19, 2013, at 5:27 AM, Christopher Wilke <[email protected]>
wrote:
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.
This would make sense only if there were a single 20th-century aesthetic
preference.
Taruskin's usual lucidity rather deserted him here, floating away in a sea
of abstract nouns. It all falls apart when you try to be specific about
it. For example, he famously suggested (in his article in Early Music
magazine around 1983, if not in Text and Act, a book I've never succeeded
in slogging all the way through) that Emma Kirkby's straight delivery had
as much to do with Joan Baez as with being historically informed, an odd
notion in my view, since I always found Baez' vibrato too intense for my
taste. But even assuming Taruskin chose a good example, why did Kirkby
emulate Baez, rather than some other singer who was popular in the sixties
and early seventies? She could have chosen to sing like Elvis Presley,
Frank Sinatra, Rod McKuen, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin (wouldn't
you love to hear Jagger and Joplin sing "Sweet Kate"?), John Lennon, Andy
Williams, Merle Haggard, Birgit Nilsson or Beverly Sills, all of whom
represented current aesthetic preferenc!
es. Why not any of them as the model for a "modern fabrication"? I'm
inclined to go for the obvious explanation that answers questions rather
than raising them: people in early are doing what they think they're
doing.
The important thing about "20th-century aesthetic preferences to past
music" is that the 20th century preferred past music. Audiences turned
out for music of the 18th and 19th centuries more than for the new stuff.
That had never happened before. Classical music, and the symphony
orchestra in particular, became museums preserving music of previous
generations, and the logical and inevitable outgrowth of that phenomenon
was that some of the curators wanted to do it "right," just like the
curators who cleaned the old cloudy varnish off the Rembrandt painting
called the "Night Watch" and discovered it wasn't a night scene at all.
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,
Because early musicians spend lots of time in factories????
Beware the logical fallacy of "they exist at the same time, therefore
there must be some cause and effect," or you can wind up joining the
"vaccination causes [insert your favorite ailment here]" crowd. Cause and
effect requires a mechanism.
In any event, mechanized industrialization and assembly lines have
coexisted for nearly a century with continuous vibrato, which is largely a
post-World War I development and is still the dominant way of playing and
singing classical music -- some higher-level orchestras have taken to
playing Mozart differently from the way they play Rachmaninoff, but it
hasn't filtered down much to the less exalted professional ranks.
and the repeatable, homogenized
regularity of product made possible by the use of computers.
I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you talking about digital recording,
or something else?
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.
True in a very limited way, insofar as the spirit of earlier times was "I
play the way I play because I like to play that way; I play the best way I
can based on my own inclinations and the way I was taught to play."
That's essentially the way nearly everyone did it until the early music
movement built momentum, and it works very well until you start playing
something outside the current style, such as -- oh, I don't know -- Mozart
or Bach. Or Dowland. Or Beethoven.
The notion of fidelity to Beethoven's intent, let alone Albeniz', did not
occur to most musicians of Segovia's generation. Toscanini, who was older
than Segovia and active the first half of the 20th century, was known for
being faithful to "the score" precisely because it made him unusual.
Critics, biographers and the musicians who played under him went on and on
about it. Landowska's comment about "you play Bach your way and I'll play
it his way" was similarly famous because it was out of the mainstream.
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