Depths and Dimness, part 2

One of the things I wanted to get to yesterday, but could only hint at, is how much our view of the past is influenced by the fact that it is our view, from our perspective. I was outraged the first time I encountered Richard Taruskin's brilliant discussion of the Early Music Movement and particularly the concept of 'authenticity' that was so important. He pointed out, against considerable protest and resistance, that the values of modernism: crisp execution within strict tempi, for example, were precisely the values that were supposedly the 'authentic' ones of early music performance. Why? Well, because it was musicians from the same generation that were both creating modern music and re-creating Baroque music.

This brings me back to my sardonic remark of yesterday: "why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff?"
 Well, it doesn't, of course, but any musician/scholar of today is going to be unconsciously looking to come up with something that sounds 'ancient' and since there are no models, then the primitivism of Orff will inevitably lurk in the back of one's mind. Ancient music notation is so vague and confusing that it is like a Rorschach inkblot upon which we can project whatever is on our minds. Here is the Orff piece:

At the root of both modernism and the search for ancient music are the same aesthetic values. As Taruskin points out, early music performance is precisely 'authentic' if it does reflect our aesthetic values. How else could it be?

But still, the urge to hear, to understand music that is far from us, like capturing an image of a moon of Saturn in a flyby, never quite leaves us. But we will only be affected by the music if we do somehow share aesthetic values with it. Often, like the music by Carl Orff, we will be merely projecting our aesthetic values on music that may not share them... The book to read is the collection of essays Text and Act by Richard Taruskin.

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The Depths and Dimness of Music History

I was tempted to title this "Why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff" but while catchy, it's not quite accurate. This deserves a longer post, but I wanted to put up a few thoughts as an introduction. Here is the problem: what did the music of previous times sound like? This is partly an historical problem and partly a notational problem. Historians tend to disagree even about recent events such as the American Civil War or even the Kennedy assassination. Imagine how much disagreement there could be about ancient Babylonian music.

Music is an ephemeral art--or it was until recording technology was invented little more than 100 years ago. As soon as a piece is performed, it vanishes into the air. For much of human history music was created and played spontaneously. In a few places the need developed to put something down as an aid to memory. Perhaps the priests wanted to be sure they got the hymn correct so the god would not be displeased. This might be the reason that the Hurrian Songs were preserved in cuneiform. Thanks to Jon Silpayamanant for the suggestion. But what are the odds that anything scholars have come up with bears any resemblance to the actual music? It is even a bit of a speculation that what we have is a musical score:

It was the unsystematic succession of the interval names, their location below apparently lyric texts, and the regular interpolation of numerals that led to the conclusion that these were notated musical compositions. 

But the sound of a piece of music can vary immensely even if it is a piece from the recent past. Imagine you had a simple song chart for "My Way". You might perform it this way:

Or this way:

Both ways are "My Way".

It was only in the 19th century that musicians started thinking about the music of the past. Before then, a particularly diligent composer like J. S. Bach might collect and study scores of his predecessors going back a couple of generations, but most music heard was very recent. The exception is folk music, which can be much older. So in the 19th century scholars started digging around in old libraries and unearthed scores going back a long way indeed. The Catholic Church had been preserving chants going back a millenium, but scholars discovered much, much more.

After a while, performers wanted to explore this music as well and in the 20th century a few pioneers started trying to revive Baroque and Renaissance music. At first they played it just the way they would play any music. But then the realization dawned that this music was performed very differently than Brahms, say, or Elgar. In the 1960s and 70s the Early Music Movement was born and we started hearing a whole new spectrum of musical sounds:

I have to end here, but I will post more later...

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