Is anything set in stone here or is it entirely a matter of opinion? To my ears a great deal of "early music" sounds like "early rock 'n roll"!!
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Early Music - when does it stop being "early"
Is anything set in stone here or is it entirely a matter of opinion? To my ears a great deal of "early music" sounds like "early rock 'n roll"!!
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Hello, uncleboko (weren't you on the old messageboards?)
I think it depends on the context - whatever is convenient. The Early Music Show has taken in Mozart. I think of it as being pre-Baroque, but with Baroque included when the term is used more broadly.
Are you saying you think Mozart is pre-baroque?Originally Posted by french frank
Hello, uncleboko (weren't you on the old messageboards?)
I think it depends on the context - whatever is convenient. The Early Music Show has taken in Mozart. I think of it as being pre-Baroque, but with Baroque included when the term is used more broadly.
In a way though J S Bach is considered pre-Baroque, or something like that, but I think of him as being modern, even contemporary ...
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No. But if asked I would say he was 'classical' i.e. post-Baroque.
I just meant that he had featured on The Early Music Show thus, apparently, stretching the meaning of 'Early Music' to a point where I wouldn't like to be around when the elastic snapped.
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I always used to think early music was anything that appeared on Telefunken's Das Alte Werke.
I agree and personally think of Mozart as Classical. I suppose the EMS stretch the meaning quite often ...
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It's really a meaningless term. You could place the line anywhere. 1600, 1750, 1800, 1914, 1945, 2011...
It's a bit like calling Europe a continent, which it isn't. (It's just a convenient division of Asia). But I digress.
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In the sense that you don't know how it's being used in a particular context. I would personally use it to mean medieval and renaissance (i.e. pre-Baroque Western) music. But that's just me
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I think it has almost lost its meaning, yes. Or rather, it has several meanings. If you go to an HMV shop they may have an 'Early Music' section, which will probably mean anthologies of stuff up to and including renaissance and early baroque.
But for professionals in the 'early music' world the term no longer has a chronological limit - it is more a matter of approach (which is why the term Historically Informed Performance and Practice (HIPP) has tended to become the norm) - to quote from reports of the Early Music Network -
"‘Early Music’ is to be understood as a conventional rather than a chronological term, and is here taken to mean historically-informed performance; particularly that on forms of instruments with which a composer would have been familiar and music performed with techniques and in styles which get closer to the composer’s original conception, or of particular later traditions of performance, than is possible if other approaches are employed."
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I suppose it was a convenient term for music that had been given very little attention by performers for a long period of time.
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