When I was at Peabody for my undergraduate work, most recordings of early music were of the “Masterpieces of Music Before 1750” variety–that is to say, lifeless, sanctimonious performances by scholarly types, who gave one the impression that European music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early Baroque was nothing but blah, emotionless, rhythmless stuff. Boring as all get-out. Some of those recordings remain available. Not too long ago I checked out the afore-mentioned “Mastepieces of Music Before 1750” and listened through it again, sort of for old-times sake, as it were.
They were every bit as horrible as I remembered them to be, or more so given that I know now that those recordings are such a poor representation of earlier music that they are almost worse than useless. In some cases I was staggered by the banality and just plain incompetence of the performances. There was a clavichord rendition, for example, in which the performer hadn’t bothered to tune the instrument properly before making the recording. Most of the time people sounded as though they were all drugged; slow tempi, absolutely no expression or imagination. Everything was sung in a kind of cool, neutral sound.
Fortunately there has been abundant progress. Just to give one example, the Dufay Collective’s wonderful recording of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a set of Spanish songs from the late middle ages (same era as the troubadours and trouveres.) In their performances it all comes alive, boisterously and beautifully so. Rhythm, snap, wonderful playing and great singing. This makes sense. People didn’t like boring music in the 13th century any more than they like it in the 21st century. I don’t believe that music which managed to survive the ravages of time is all lifeless, boring, colorless stuff. Of course the notation is sketchy, with practically nothing in the way of performing forces or performance styles indicated in the msuic. But people are still people, and it seems to me that I’m liable to be moved and entertained by more or less the same stuff as my forbears of the 13th or 14th centuries. Rhythm, interesting playing, good singing–it all works no matter what the period style.
In many was the whole early music movement has been a wonderful gift, since it has brought back a lot of music that deserves a place in our modern world, and (most importantly) has helped to remove some of the cobwebs–which weren’t put there by history, but by historians.