This subject was raised in our early days of R3ok forum structure discussions in February, and a recent PM to me has raised it again.

I'm in mind to agree with the request. There IS a section/board for R3's Early Music Show which is underused so I could create a new Early Music board and then shift all threads on early music and early composers into it.

...but we also currently have a Baroque Music section......

What's to do....


John W

I think once upon a time there was Normal Music which the orchestras played and there was Early Music which was before the Normal Music. But now lots of other periods are a regular part of the listening diet to the point where a meaningful structure (assuming one needs to divide it up at all which I'm not normally such a fan of anyway) might be Early, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20th Century, Contemporary or some such thing... Maybe with the outer ones combined: Renaissance and earlier, and 20/21 for example. There will always be overlap composers though: Monteverdi, the Sons O'Bach, Beethoven, Mahler...

I think a "Pre-Baroque" board would be a very nice idea.  It's too broad a category in some terms, of course, but if it's good enough for record shops it's good enough for R3OK, as far as I'm concerned.

(what the (#$* does the "OK" stand for, anyway?  That's been bothering me for months.)

Personally I would suggest that 'pre-Baroque', 'Renaissance and earlier' or some such formulation open at the 'left-hand' end would allow absolutely anything that might come along to find a home - I think ancient Greek music did come close to being discussed at some point...

I wonder how many people know just quite how flimsy the evidence is upon which a lot of performances of medieval music is founded, thinking about that? Such as when there is one surviving picture, which one looks at to see whether a man has his mouth open or not, and on that basis decides whether to use voices in the performance?

I am not aware of the details of this.  Performance of early music is something that's somewhere near the top) of my long list of things to read up on.

I read up quite a bit around two years ago when I was teaching a course on performance practice (a bit rusty on that period now, need to bod up again), what really amazed me was just quite the extent of guess-work involved. The reliable data that exists is mighty small.

Good place to start is the Music before 1600 volume of Howard Mayer Brown and Stanley Sadie's Performance Practice. For a comprehensive overview of research into performance practice, Roland Jackson's encyclopedia, just called Performance Practice, is as about as good as anything (important to get the hugely revised 2005 version), though it's heavily biased towards English-language writings, and not all of its summaries of others' writings are particularly coherent. Nonetheless, it's a good place to find references for further reading on just about anything that might interest you.

I compiled the following bibliography (only English-language publications) on medieval performance practice, which might be of interest to some>

Elizabeth Aubrey – The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington, 2000)
Stanley Boorman (ed) – Studies in the Performance of Late Medieval Music (Cambridge, 1983)
John Caldwell – Editing Early Music (Oxford, 1985)
Frederick Crane – Extant Medieval Instruments: A Provisional Catalogue by Types (Iowa, 1972)
Richard L. Crocker – An Introduction to Gregorian Chant (New Haven, 2000)
Ross W. Duffin (ed) – A Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music (Bloomington, 2002)
Mark Everist (ed) – Music before 1600 (Oxford, 1992)
John Haines – Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouveres: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge, 2004)
John Haines and Randall Rosenfield (eds) – Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Palaeography and Performance (Aldershot, 2004)
David Hiley – Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1995)
Richard Hoppin – Medieval Music (New York, 1980); Anthology of Medieval Music (New York, 1980)
Tess Knighton and David Fallows (eds) – Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music (Oxford, 1998)
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson – The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (Cambridge, 2002)
Timothy McGee – Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Performer’s Guide (Toronto, 1988)
Timothy McGee – Medieval Instrumental Dances (Bloomington, 1990)
Timothy McGee – The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises (Oxford, 1998)
Jeremy Montagu – The World of Medieval and Renaissance Musical Instruments (London, 1976)
John Morehen (ed) – English Choral Practice 1400-1650 (Cambridge, 2003)
David Munrow – Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Oxford, 1976)
Christopher Page – Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Studies in Texts and Performance (Aldershot, 1997)
Carl Parrish – The Notation of Medieval Music (Hillsdale, NY, 1978)
Keith Polk – German Instrumental Music of the Middle Ages: Players, Patrons and Performance Practice (Cambridge, 2005)
Elizabeth Phillips – Performing Medieval and Renaissance Music: An Introductory Guide (Basingstoke, 1986)
A.G. Rigg, David Klausner, Timothy McGee – Singing Early Music: The Pronunciation of European Languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (Bloomington, 1996)

So, we could go with David Munrow and have a Middle Ages and Renaissance board