KEMP and others try to puzzle out what music sounded like before 1750
by Joe Tarr
When Thomas Tallant gives lectures on early music, he often tells the audience to imagine they're living 200 or 300 years in the future and someone wants to learn how to play a Beatles song.
"You don't know what they sounded like. How are you going to do it?" he asks. "Well, first you would find a person who can build the instruments they used. Maybe you have a video clip you could look at. But if you don't have anything to go by, you're essentially making it up. You've got to reconstruct everything yourself."
Thanks to recorded technology, of course, people will have a pretty good idea of what the Beatles sounded like. But learning to play a song by the 16th century lute player and composer John Dowland—well, that's a little bit trickier.
For starters, Dowland didn't write his music down. Amateurs transcribed some of his songs, but often no one understands the musical notation they used. Then there's the fact that the lute—a wooden stringed instrument that evolved from the Middle Eastern ud in the Middle Ages—has been mostly obsolete for 250 years. Few people play it or know how it sounds; even fewer can make the instrument.
"A lot of times the notes on the page don't make sense," Tallant says. "It's especially difficult for singers because there's no way to know what people sounded like back then. There's a lot of detective work that goes into this."
For a small group of musicians and musicologists, that detective work is part of the attraction to playing so-called "early music." The Knoxville Early Music Project—or KEMP—has been established here since 1991, giving several performances a year and touring in the region. And this weekend, one of the most highly regarded early music groups, The Newberry Consort, will play a Halloween-themed show in Knoxville.
Early music is a pretty broad term. Basically, it covers anything written from the Medieval times until about 1750, when Mozart and Haydn started the classical music movement. Early music includes Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music periods.
Unlike a lot of classical music—which never went out of circulation and is still being performed today—most early music was lost to obscurity (with the exception of some ceremonial music).
But over the years, a number of people have tried to figure it out and revive it. Mendelssohn was one of the first when he brought back Bach's St. Matthew Passion early in the 19th century.
Arnold Dolmetsch, who lived from 1858 to 1940, did the most to revive the music. He was something of a one-man research institute, digging through archives to interpret old musical scores, building replicas of early musical instruments and performing the music on those instruments.
A number of musicians started building on Dolmetsch's work in the '50s and '60s, and the movement slowly grew.
Tallant says early music practitioners come from all backgrounds, and most of them are playing other types of music, too. Amy Porter was trained as an opera and music theater singer. After one of her performances, Tallant approached and asked if she'd ever sung any early music. Porter didn't know much about it. "It was such an intriguing question to ask. That alone compelled me to look into it," Porter says.
Director of the vocal programs for Knoxville's Community School of the Arts and a Pellissippi State teacher, Porter sings soprano with KEMP and plays percussion.
Tallant had studied classical guitar in college and was working as a freelance electric and folk guitar player when he stumbled upon it.
"I had a guitar teacher who played the lute, and I fell in love with it," he says. "It's like you don't know anything about jazz, and you hear Coltrane, and suddenly all you want to play is the tenor saxophone. I liked the way the lute looked. Then my instructor played it and I fell in love."
Tallant also plays baroque guitar and theorbo, a member of the lute family, with KEMP.
Ann Stierli played flute for years with the Miami Philharmonic Orchestra and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. She says the early music groups are more down to earth. The best viol player in the world is a lot more accessible than the best violinist.
"They are more real. The orchestral world is so political. If you get together with 50 flute players, they're going to be at each others' throats because it's so competitive," Stierli says. "If you play this music, you're not in it for the money."
"People tend to have a curiosity. Quite a few of the modern classical musicians I've met don't have much curiosity about the composers," Tallant adds.
She doesn't like to talk much about herself, but Stierli has been a great champion of early music in Knoxville. A member of K.E.M.P. since 1994, she plays several string and wind instruments. For the group she plays the recorder, the baroque flute, and the viol de gamba. The last one is a stringed instrument that looks like a cello but is a closer relative of the guitar, because it has frets and is tuned in 4ths and a 3rd. It's played with a bow, underhand style.
Stierli gives music lessons and leads some amateur groups, including the Knoxville chapters of the American Recorder Society and the Viola da Gamba Society of America.
The three talked about their music after practice last week at Stierli's home in North Knoxville. (Martha Bishop, who plays bass and treble viols and harp with KEMP, couldn't make the practice.)
One attraction all of them have to the music is the challenge of interpreting it and the freedom to improvise when they can't. Porter says the way groups interpret various pieces varies wildly. "You'd almost think you were listening to different pieces," she says.
First attempts at recreating early music were extremely flat and banal, especially vocally. Recordings from the '50s and '60s have a stripped, plaintive tone to them, Porter says. Today, singers put much more emotion into voices, using the full range.
Tallant describes the earlier, less-emotive approaches this way: "This is like looking at black and white photographs and thinking the world looked grainy back then. When in fact, everything was in color. Early music at one time was modern music; it was avant-garde in its day," Tallant says.
Of course, no early music group really knows if they're getting the sound right. "Do we know what Bach sounded like? No," Tallant says. "If you want to learn bluegrass, what do you do? You go buy a Bill Monroe record. How can you go buy a Bach record?"
KEMP used to play Medieval music, but no longer does. "It's incredibly hard to do. We know very little about Medieval music. In some cases we don't know what the notes mean. They're written down, but we don't know what they mean."
Today, the group mainly sticks to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, although Tallant adds, "occasionally we go into the 1700s."
The music is difficult to describe because it covers such a large period of time and because various groups interpret it differently. The groups are small ensembles, and the songs include folk ballads, dance music, and elegies. Much of the singing is operatic; some of the songs are a cappella.
"Rhythmically, the music is very complex. In fact, some of it's impossible to play," Stierli says. "It sounds contemporary because it's so complex. But that only lasted through the Renaissance and then it went away."
In its day, it wouldn't have been performed for large audiences, Tallant says. The groups didn't travel, but were employed in courts or by bishops. "Rome would have had a bishop who would have had his own musicians. They would have played for him, composed for him, and been at his beck and call," he says. Competition was often fierce, with courts competing for the best musicians.
There were also many folk musicians whose songs would frequently filter up to the upper classes, where the songs would be transcribed.
Much of the music wasn't written down, but there are scores of songs that were transcribed in archives around the world. "The Vatican has a huge collection and nobody's ever played it. There are vaults of it," Tallant says. "It isn't like there's only so much music and everybody plays it."
Tallant sees echoes of early music in all kinds of places—from old-timey music (which is newer than early music), to classical music, to the prog- and folk-rock of Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention and Yes.
Stierli is more self-deprecating about this odd but fascinating interest. "It's a subculture," she says. "It's not related to the rest of the world."
Friday evening's Halloween concert by the Newberry Consort will examine the worldview of the Middle Ages, a time when "alchemists sought to transform base metals into gold, the music of the Heavenly Spheres was echoed in the music of the day, and peasants and nobles alike knew a world inhabited by creatures other than humans."
The program concludes with a ghost story from 14th century Italy.
October 30, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 44
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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