Description
Of all the periods that are broadly termed “classical music,” early music—which encompasses roughly 1100 years—is by far the chronologically longest and by far the most vaguely defined. While it can mean any music in the Western tradition written before the year 1600 or so, “early music” is mostly used to refer to any music created in Europe from medieval times through the beginning of the Baroque period. By default, then, this term encompasses everything from liturgical plainchant from around the turn of the first millennium CE to Renaissance choral music composed at the same time as the construction of France's great cathedrals to earthy reconstructions of folk music from the Celtic countryside to the earliest “art” songs, the courtly poems set to music by the aristocratic troubadours. Of all the myriad styles grouped together under the rubric of “early music,” the one that is most widely known in popular culture is probably Gregorian chant.
Unlike in later centuries, early music was not consistently notated in full, and even the systems of notation often differed wildly from place to place and from generation to generation. In addition, we assume that certain developments, such as polyphony (music created for more than one part) existed in improvised form for perhaps centuries before such complexity was actually notated. The most thoroughly notated manuscripts come from religious sources, and. As such, the early music practitioners of our own day are often as much scholarly detectives as they are musicians. This research, which has become much more popular in the past forty years or so, has led directly to the field of what is currently called “historically informed performance”—that is, trying to make this music come alive again in the ways in which such work was originally intended to be performed.
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