Locating the Past in the Present: Living Traditions and the Performance of Early Music

Abstract

This study examines the philosophies, values and ethics of Early Music performers who use living musics to inform and enhance their performance styles and techniques. Early Music performers seek to revive lost traditions of performance, relying on spare descriptions and fragmentary evidence. Since the 1950s, several generations of visionary performers have turned to living musical traditions for inspiration and collaboration in the recreation of earlier European repertoires. Early Music specialists who follow this path hold their informants and collaborators in high esteem and treat their beliefs with respect. They often avoid surface aspects of the musics on which they draw, instead favouring large-scale structural features and performance techniques from which they can develop models for their own work. While many have criticized this approach as an appeal to the exotic and as an extension of 19th-century orientalizing projects, few scholarly studies have sought to understand it from the point of view of the musicians themselves. Ethnography in the field of Early Music – in conjunction with the published writings of the musicians – provides a valuable perspective on this living art. Western classical music in general is under-represented in ethnomusicological research and deserves sympathetic, though not necessarily uncritical, ethnographies. Collaborative projects between historical musicologists and ethnomusicologists on the place of past music in the present would benefit both fields.

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