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A polyphonic Mass is not a symphony: some occupational hazards of recording early music

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/em/cas151

1741-7260

E. Roche,

Musicians’ Health and Performance

For those whose memories are long enough, looking back to the state of recorded early music in 1973 is to peer into a very different world, in which the default option for a recording of medieval or Renaissance music was an LP containing a miscellaneous programme of merry songs and dances, featuring the more raucous types of newly revived early wind instruments. The enormous popularity of this sort of thing owed a great deal to the pioneering work of groups such as Musica Reservata and David Munrow’s Early Music Consort, perhaps especially to the incidental music which the latter provided for the highly acclaimed BBC TV dramas Henry VIII and Elizabeth R. 1973, however, seems also to have been the year when endless repetitions of Henry VIII’s ‘Pastyme with good company’ with crumhorns, rackets and rauschpfeifen slowly began to give way to the recorded exploration of more substantial, and less noisy, repertories—including the release of such important recordings as the Early Music Consort’s three-LP set The art of courtly love and their Dufay Se la face ay pale Mass, which, followed by later collections such as The art of the Netherlands, were among the first shoots of the vast expansion of the recorded medieval and Renaissance repertory which is still burgeoning today. That year also saw the foundation of the Academy of Ancient Music, which, under Christopher Hogwood’s direction, extended the use of period instruments into the later Baroque period, thus pioneering not only a transformation of attitudes to the performance of much already familiar music, but also bringing less widely known composers, such as Vivaldi, fully into the limelight.