- Such and such an earlier scholar said that one or more lines in some polyphonic musical genre (e.g. ars antiqua hockets, the tenor in ars nova motets, 15th century contratenors) was obviously intended to be instrumental, due to it being untexted and in some other ways different from main vocal line (e.g. slow, ornate, unusual interval jumps).
- However evidence can be brought forward to suggest it is possible for all lines to be performed vocally. Some evidence is internal (e.g. manuscript details such as indications of underlay), some external (e.g. some literary accounts of performance that don't mention instruments) and some comes performance practice (e.g. flexibility in tuning successive intervals that can be difficult on some instruments).
- Therefore it is wrong (inauthentic, not historically informed) to perform this music with instruments on some lines.
trouble me the bourdon
Friday 23 January 2015
A logical leap
I've been trying to trace back through the scholarly arguments for 'a cappella' performance, and finding it frequently takes this form:
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There is a painting (by Costa, Lorenzo the Elder) on the Web Gallery of Art depicting singers accompanied by a lute. It is dated 1485-1495. Does pictorial evidence not count, or is this painting too late?
ReplyDeleteNo, the 'a cappella' mafia are well ahead of you there: "it is undeniable that iconography offers many representations of singers and players. The crippling problem with this material, however, is that it is usually impossible to establish what kind of music is being 'performed in the picture'... [referring to a 1376 picture of singer and gittern player] ... the singer and his associate[s] might equally well be performing a simple monophonic rondeau" C.Page "Polyphony before 1400", in Brown & Sadie (eds.) Performance Practice: music before 1600.
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