Hi, I’m a new co-author to this blog and early music is quite new to me although i have played it all my life. I am mostly puzzled, stupiefied and amazed by the things possible (and impossible) in early music and i hope my startlement will only increase as more early music reveals itself before my anxious eyes and fingers.

I’m actually an organist that recently threw my energy on the harpsichord. I now play many kinds of music with many different people. I’m happy to discover that many techniques used on the organ can be used on the harpsichord too (and many cannot - still happy, and learning). I hope you will find your time to comment and discuss my following post on these and many other matters concerning early music.

Happy blogging

Sarah Peck has started to build a gamba. It’s all nicely documented on her blog and the progression will be linked in the column to the right. Check out the first entries about the beginning: and how far she has come today: Looking forward to following your progress, Sarah. Keep us updated!

Hi, I thought I’d give you a heads-up on what’s happening with the blog. It’s now almost one month ago that the blog officially came up on http://earlymusicblog.net and we’ve added a number of features. We’ve now got the most recent scores from the Werner Icking Music Archive linked in the sidebar, a number of blogs linked up and their resent posts linked and made bookmarking on different bookmarking services up and running. Not to mention a little set of entries and a couple of design changes.

So what are the goals for the next month? Getting active co-authors and improving the blog further, and finding more blogs to link up. So please post your early music blog link as a comment here and I’ll add it quickly. If you’d like to become an author, send me an email. There are already a handful of co-authors that are gearing up to submit their first article. Stay tuned for yet an interesting month!

Christian and Annette Mondrup maintain an archive of scores for recorder ensembles. The latest addition is a madrigal consisting of 8 parts for 5 voices: Al bel de tuoi capelli by Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605). The score is complete with text, so should be nice for singing as well.

I’ve been reading Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellemister and written about it a bit in my blog in the entries Mattheson on Perfection, The Location of Paradise Revealed, The Origin of Music and What you really need to know about Angles. Today I’m reading chapter six, and I love how he writes about the need for good posture:

Can the attentive listener be moved to pleasure if he [….] sees a dozen violinists who contort their bodies as if they are ill? If the clavier player writhes hsi jaws, wrinkles his brow, and contorts his face to such an extent that it could frighten children? If many of the wind instrumentalists contort or inflate their facial features (one must not omit the lips of the flutist) so that they can bring them back to their proper shape and color in half an hour only with difficulty?

It is even said of Minerva, that she threw the flute away just because wind instruments have the misfortune that they distort the features; and is also known from history that Alcibiades, though he was otherwise a great lover of music, nevertheless hated flute playing for the cited reasons. The viola da gamba would have pleased him more: For there is, after the lute, hardly any instrument with which one can produce a more refined posture. Because of this, the French love both instruments before all others, since their strong inclination toward the bon air often goes so far that their zeal makes them seem comical.

In paragraph 23, chapter 4, page 58 of On playing the Flute Quantz writes on intonating:

“The flute has the innate defect that some of its notes when sharpened [playing sharps] are not quite true, some being a little too low, some a little to high. For in tuning the flute you must first see to it that the natural [diatonic] notes are tuned truly in accordance with their proportions. The faulty ones you must, as much as possible, seek to play in tune with the help of your embouchure and your ear.�?

This is a little note to those who claim that you should play any instrument as is and that some instruments can never be played in tune. Many other instruments have the same problems (i.e. saxophone and recorder) and the players of all the instruments that have these problems should seek to play them as well intonated as possible.

In paragraph 16 he writes: “This defect can be easily remedied, however, if the player possesses a good embouchure, a good musical ear, a correct system of fingering, and an adequate knowledge of the proportions of the notes.�?

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to go practice playing in tune

Funny thing, I’ve found two other blogs called The Early Music Blog [1] and [2]. [1] is Italian and hasn’t been updated since september and [2] is a republished version of Goldberg Magazine. These two and other blogs I found or are emailed to me will be put in a feed and new updates from these blogs will be posted in the right-hand sidebar so that you can always have easy access to updated early music blogs (hopefully with original names, though, or we’ll have to come up with some kind of numbering system )

During a visit to the coffee shop with Ulrik and Ketil recently, I learned that in the renaissance the zink/cornetto and the oboe are described as the instruments that are closest to the voice, so one can speculate if singing technique has changed from very nasal in the renaissance to a more “classic” ideal that is closer to the flute when Quantz writes On playing the Flute.

While discussing embouchure (Chapter 4, page 55) Quantz notes how close the flute is to the human voice and saying that working with chest voice and falsetto is just like tightening the lips when playing the flute (in his view it is this that makes the flute a natural instrument), he comes with the funniest attack on the French and their singing:

“The Italians and several other nations unite this falsetto with the chest voice, and make use of it to great advantage in singing: among the French, however, it is not customary, and for that reason their singing in the high register is often transformed into a disagreeable shrieking, the effect of which is exactly the same created when you do not cover the mouth hole sufficiently on the flute, and when you try to force out the high notes by blowing more strongly.”

Unfortunately I haven’t heared many (only one comes to mind) recordings where the singers have experimented with using shrieking or very nasal singing. Perhaps the contemporary ways of baroque singing is still too nice?

In On playing the Flute paragraph 17 chapter I, page 34, Quantz describes the “flutes d’amour” as a flute that is a minor third lower than the common flute. Funny, as I always imagined it was a name for the voice flute (a recorder in D), being a minor third lower than the alto recorder.

In my previous post from Quantz “On playing the Flute” I quoted:

“Whoever is aware of how much influence mathematics and other related sciences, such as philosophy, poetry, and oratory, have upon music, will have to own not only that music has a greater compass than many imagine, but also that the evident lack of knowledge about the above-mentioned sciences among the majority of professional musicians is a great obstacle to their further advancement, and the reason why music has not yet been brought to a more perfect state.”

What I find very interesting is that Quantz criticizes the contemporary music of having many flaws and would like music students to be more educated. I wonder what his take on the conservatory studies today would be as they in my mind are much more narrow than what my impression of those days requirements are. This is great so that we can spend more time with our instruments, but as Quantz recognizes it does not necessarily make us good musicians as much as able technicians. People often argue that they make music because they play what’s they feel. But if we do study the language, how do we know what the composers wanted us to feel? How can we hope to communicate these feelings to our audience when we do not know the subtleties the composer put into these feelings? Just to speculate a bit, does the fact that we miss out on a great many subjects contribute to the mysticism of music where so many claim not to understand it or even claim to be non-musical?

Hope no-one got offended, as usual this is my thinking out loud and hoping to get your comments on the matter.