Sunday 13 September 2009

on the train north from London
We’ve been in London having a great time at a family wedding, and on the train I’ve been reading Bruce Haynes’s book The End of Early Music, which is hugely entertaining and provokes all kinds of reactions, as you’d expect of a well-researched and occasionally wild polemic. 

For one thing it makes me feel rather old: I mean, I must be getting on a bit if OUP have published a book that expresses many prejudices that I share. For example, how wonderful it is to see this in print … 

… symphony orchestras and opera companies are gradually appearing in their real form as a glorious anachronism, an expensive and obsolete relic, maintaining the fiction of an unbroken performing tradition to Romantic times.

… and to hear of Susie Napper’s incredulity at seeing someone in tails conduct a Bach aria. Yes, such a thing is patently ridiculous. And what a relief to read Bruce’s cogent criticisms of the performing style of several well-respected ‘early music’ ensembles, illustrated with audio examples available on the OUP website. Plus, his two-paragraph demolition job on the Tallis Scholars and their ilk as 'predictable … competent but boring, without message … "easy listening" … "feel good" music' made me want to stand up and cheer. It was the unimaginative performances of such Oxbridge-influenced groups that first got me interested in studying early English music back in the 1980s. I could tell the compositions were great, but I could also tell that they should really sound much better than the comforting halo of choral mush which was obscuring many of their most exciting aspects, even with the occasional inappropriate mannerism thrown in as ‘expression’.

Bruce and Susie N. have a curious place in Concerto Caledonia’s history, at it was in their house in Montréal that DG, Chris and I finally made it into the same place at the same time back in 2004, rehearsing with Suzie in their front room, and the three of us staying in the house in their back yard. There was a huge building site across the road at the time, so everything was covered in an inch-thick layer of dust, but it didn’t matter. 

Anyway, I still can’t quite agree with Bruce’s encouragement for composers to write in a ‘Period’ style, which he thinks will get the early music movement out of our ‘cover band’ mentality. If you’re dealing with the music of the past, a cover band mentality is really the sanest and most useful approach: you can still decide whether you want to be a club singer 'singing the songs of' Tina Turner, or the Bootleg Beatles doing a big-scale tour with staggering levels of attention to historical detail. Starting to compose what Bruce calls 'correctly attributed fakes' can lead you into a very strange personal relationship with history if you’re not already firmly rooted in the present. For example, one of my favourite records is The Dukes of Stratosphear’s Psonic Psunspot, a whole album written, performed and recorded in the style of 1968, but in fact made some 20 years later with great wit and skill by XTC, as a 'correctly attributed fake'. But XTC hadn’t been a covers band up until then: from 1977 on they expressed rather well the spirit of their own time, albeit with an enthusiasm for the music of the past. Besides this, composing 18th-century music might be a useful exercise for the musician, but what possible use is it to the musician's audience?  It's a bit like writing poetry in 16th century Scots.

That aside, the book is a wonderful snapshot of what the early music movement appears to be about and how far it’s come, taken from an extremely useful and informed point of view. I hope as many as possible of us read it, to find out about ourselves, and to give us plenty to argue about as to what might happen next.