performance

As a violinist and musical director I perform (mostly) early music.

The expression ‘early music’ is used in two ways.

In the first, narrower sense, early music is a colloquial name for the musical cultures of the European peoples between the Commercial Revolution of the fifteenth century and the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century – before the large-scale exploitation of natural resources through advanced technical means, the mass production and world-wide commercialisation of goods, the replacement of the master-pupil model of instruction with the class format we still practise.

In the second, broader sense, early music is a way of interpreting European music from the earliest written record to the late nineteenth century according to historical performance practices and, when possible, on period or copies of period instruments.

An early-music specialist is therefore a musician, usually trained to conservatoire standards, whose interpretations of pre-1900 repertoires are informed by musicological findings about historical performance practices (so-called ‘historically informed performance’ or HIP).

I use the expression early music in its second less narrow sense.

Not as a ‘period’ of western music history – in itself a highly problematic concept – but rather as an attitude, a set of habits or, if you will, a methodology, which results in varied activities ranging from the rediscovery of little-known and under-appreciated repertoires to the revival of lost instruments and playing techniques.

The philosophical underpinning to those activities is the tenet that the music under study will be better served by a knowledge of those performance practices.

If early music is really nothing more than a series of vocal and instrumental practices reconstructed in modern times and applied retrospectively to musical repertoires from before the time in which we live, one may also think of it as a kind of counterpart, invented by musicologists and performers, to modern musical historiography.

Music history is not an object from the past waiting to be discovered by us but the intellectual activity of a subject in relation to a more or less determined object from the past – typically a work, but also an instrument, a conventional sign, a literary text, etc.

Understanding these practices as the fruit of a contemporary activity is crucial to understanding the whole early-music movement as a historical phenomenon in its own right as well as the field of early music as a theoretical construct characteristic of a very modern mentality which was of course totally alien to that of past musicians who were mostly interested in their own local contemporaneous practices.