CHAPTER

The Approach
1.

to Early

Music

PREVIEW OF AN 'EARLY* STYLE

the fifteen years over which I was engaged on this book, our attitude to early music and its interpretation underwent a remarkable

During

transformation. In 1948, the majority of musicians viewed music earlier than J. S. Bach with considerable reservations, and remained sceptical

of any necessity to interpret early music on its own terms, that is to say on the instruments for which it was originally composed and in a style related to that of its original performers. By 1963, the pleasure which
sixteenth to eighteenth century music (indeed in some cases much older music than this) can give us had been so widely demonstrated, together with the practicability and enjoyability of a determined ap-

proach towards an authentic style, that there could no longer be any doubt as to how the matter will end. It will come to be taken as much for granted that the best specimens of early music are worth performing
reasonable respect for their composers' intentions as it is already taken for granted with regard to the nineteenth century. And why not?
all

with

At
is

the deep levels of human nature from which music speaks, J. S. Bach not so much more different from us than Beethoven, nor is Monteverdi

so

much more different from us than J. S. Bach. Those who feel, mistakenly, that early music can be made more acces-

by deliberately modernising it have an undoubted liberty to do so; but there seems very little to be said for the inadvertent modernisation which results from not having gone sufficiently into the questions of fact involved. Questions of interpretation must always revert finally to the innate musicianship of the interpreters, but questions of fact can often
sible

be decided by referring to surviving evidence, and their bearing on interpretation can be very intimate. The purpose of this book is to
contribute to our understanding of early interpretation by assembling and discussing some of the surviving evidence.

There is a place for transcriptions which are a genuine marriage of two musical personalities across the generations the product is a new and often interesting work. But in ordinary performance, music of whatever generation will sound more effective arid more moving when we make every reasonable attempt to present it under its original conditions of performance. If we want to share in a composer's experience,
:

25

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

to carry out his intentions. If we find his experience somewhat that it may be more rewarding to come strange, we have to remember to terms with an unfamiliar experience than to recapitulate a familiar be more rewarding to make the most form. It one in a less

we have

telling

may

of the unfamiliarity than to dilute that unfamiliarity in the doubtful hope of adapting it to modern ears. Modern ears are no more than ordinary ears in a modern setting. Our response to music is fundamentally intuitive, and our human
little during the longest faculty of intuition can have changed very of interpretation are period considered in this book. The fundamentals

were for Bach or Monteverdi, or indeed for must rely on our Josquin or Perotin le Grand. We not only can but intuitive response to the expressive implications of early music. But this does not mean that we have nothing to learn which the music itself
the

same

for us as they

cannot teach
It is

the contrary, we have a great deal to learn. unrealistic to think that we can give an adequate rendering of
us.

On

any music in the absence of a detailed acquaintance with its relevant conventions. Musical notation is a wonderful invention, but it is not as wonderful as all that. We need a vast amount of traditional workingknowledge in order to bring even the most cunning and thorough of these notated marks on paper into living performance. With baroque music and earlier, the tradition has been much distorted and partly forgotten; the marks may be cunning but we have to be still more cunning to know what some of them mean; while notation in general was of deliberate intention a great deal less thorough than we are nowadays accustomed to finding it. To recover something of what direct tradition can no longer convey to us, our best and indeed almost our only recourse is to read what
the actual contemporaries of the music had to say about it. Almost exactly half the words in the present book consist of quotations from the early authorities and other witnesses themselves, I do most earnestly commend these quotations to the careful attention of the reader. It is

not only that they have an inherent authenticity with which no mere summary or discussion of them can compete; it is also that they convey
unreliable in varying degrees, self-contradictory or contradictory with one another in many respects, and tiresomely repetitive in others I shall be the first to admit. I almost feel inclined to suggest that this is just why they are

so

much more than merely factual information. That they are

more faithfully than any systematically consistent account could do. The reality was neither systematic nor consistent, and no amount of learned historical afterthought can make it so,
interpretation

so valuable. They add up to such a very the original atmosphere of

human

picture*

They evoke

26

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

are trying to find out is not the exact interpretation suchand-such a composer intended for such-and-such a passage. There is no such thing as an exact interpretation. No one, not even the composer,

What we

plays a passage in exactly the

same way twice running. It would be a much duller world if music would not tolerate more than one interpretation; we should miss the intensely personal contribution which different performers have to offer, or even the same performer when in a different mood. What we are trying to find out is partly the kind of detail which did not and should not depend on mood at all, and partly the outside limits within which the performer's mood can suitably operate. We want him to illuminate different aspects of the music in accordance with whatever is individual in his response to it; we do not want him to impose his individuality on the much greater element in the music which is common to us all, and to which there is fundamentally only one way of responding. We do not want him to go outside the
style.

In the case of early music, this is tantamount to saying that we need to know, not exactly how the composer would have taken his music,

but broadly

how any good performer

of his day might have taken

it.

That leaves a very wide field for personal taste and individuality; it even opens the way to performances which I personally, or the reader, or any other given person might happen to dislike. But it does set a boundary to positive incongruities of style, because while a bad contemporary performer might all too easily have committed them (and indeed there is plenty of evidence for this at all times and places), a good contemporary performer could not have done so, unless, of course, the style in question was outside his experience even though
contemporary in time. Every piece of music carries implications with regard to performance which can be differently interpreted: but not beyond certain limits, because so soon as those limits are overstepped we feel a contradiction between the style of the music and the style of the interpretation. We

may
or

not,

it is

true, feel this contradiction explicitly;

is

we may feel vaguely

to

uneasy without knowing quite what

wrong or what
fail

we may
in

notice nothing wrong,

and merely

do about it; be moved by the

to

music as

a more understanding performance it could be moving us. But whether we are directly aware of it or not, there will still be

something missing which need not be missing, A performer contemporary with the music had opportunities for becoming familiar with the style which we are denied at this distance of time. A single satisfactory sound-recording might tell us more about

baroque methods of performance than all our painstaking researches; but we have not got that recording, and must do the best we can
27

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

without
it.

The

best

we can do

is

to start

from such contemporary

evidence as does survive.

This does not imply idealising the contemporary performers, who so far as we can make out must have been much worse than ourselves in

some branches of the art, much better in other branches, and perhaps as an overall average very much the same. It is simply that whatever else may or may not have been wrong with a contemporary performance, under ordinary circumstances it would at least have been within the style, whereas under ordinary circumstances a modern performance,
whatever
It is
its

other merits,

is

likely to

be partly at odds with the

style.

only

fair to

specialised

that extraordinary circumstances, in which some knowledge has been successfully brought to bear, are

add

becoming so much more frequent nowadays that we may in a few years time be able to regard this favourable situation as no longer the exception but the rule. I wrote these words in 1963. There were in 1963, and to some extent always will be, limits to the
authenticity

we can hope

to achieve.

Anyone

specialising in the inter-

pretation of early music needs not only a sufficiently scholarly grasp but sufficient competence and experience as a practising musician. He

must be able to get inside the problems as they actually come up in rehearsal; he must be able to envisage solutions which can come off in performance. His scholarship can only be helpful if it is used musically yet at the same time it can only be used musically if he has plenty of it. He must be in a position to weigh one piece of evidence against another. An isolated statement, out of context and perhaps untypical, can lead to devastatingly unmusical results; and that after all is the last thing we want our scholarship to end in. We are trying to be authentic
;

anything sacrosanct in historical reproduction, but because our best chance of matching the interpretation to the music
is

not because there

in

to the original intentions. scholars in order to make better music.

lies

matching

it

We

are trying to be better

our personal responsibility as performing musicians to make historical authenticity a living thing. It seems unlikely that we shall ever make so close a match that it would deceive any visiting
Ultimately
it is

hope would recognise the general style and enjoy the music. We may hope to be, not ideally, but reasonably authentic. As a corollary to being as authentic as we reasonably can, I think
that he

seventeenth-century or eighteenth-century ghost into thinking that he was listening to a performance of his own day; but at least we may

we should accept the fact that under modem conditions of performance some aspects of authenticity are more important than others, and that
worth letting the less important aspects go by the board provided we can get the more important aspects established. It is, for
it is

example,

28

THE APPROACH TO EARLY

worth a great deal to get
really

good performers who are

co-operate to the best of their ability, but who may have time nor the temperament to undergo a prolonged training In early style. On the other hand, performers who are not willing to co-operate
to the best of their ability with regard to the essential points of style are unsuitable for the purpose.

willing to neither the

musicians, again, seem to have a greater natural affinity with the stylistic requirements of early music than others. In any more or less permanent chamber ensemble or other organisation

Some modern

which wants to give special attention to early music, it Is wisest to choose members with as much of this natural affinity as possible, and
then to concentrate and go on concentrating on essentials, with as many inessentials added as the circumstances of the case permit. The

same considerations apply to performers brought together only for a

particular performance or series of performances, except that the necessity to concentrate on essentials is then still more obviously
pressing.

can only be answered in concrete detail, as this book proceeds. But it is perhaps worth asking here whether there can in principle be any such thing as might be
as to
essentials

The question

what are the

described as an 'early' style of interpretation. If we press that question too hard, it is plain that the answer must be 'no' ; but in very loose

be possible to give a more positive reply. The contemporary quotations of which this book so largely consists have the effect of building up cumulatively a picture of our predecessors in their
terms,
it

may

music-rooms and auditoriums, not as stiff historical figures but as very human beings with all our own human diversity of tastes and abilities. Behind all this diversity, however, we see also what is still more illuminating: a certain common denominator of tacit assumptions and habitual attitudes which may give us our first and most general indications of such an 'early' style of interpretation. I have fallen back on this non-committal word 'early' whenever I have

wanted to leave

am mainly though not by any means exclusively concerned in this book

approximately from Monteverdi to J. S. Bach. There is diversity enough here on any showing; but we find throughout a general disposition to join the composer and the performer in a more
with baroque music,
i.e.

my

chronological boundaries deliberately undefined.

equal partnership than our present custom is. Even when the two were not, as they so frequently were, one and the same person, the performer was expected to make the music his own with much less respect for the
written text

and much more

reliance

improvisation than we should normally expect now except in dance music. It was not that composers were lazier or performers were 29

on spontaneous expression and

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

an overriding value on the freshness and immediacy which are among the most positive results of such an
prouder, but that both parties
attitude.
set

recapture this sense of spontaneity is the most important single factor in our search for an adequately authentic rendering. Trills and

To

They valued spontaneity.

conventions of rhythm, tempo and dynamics; small forces and original instrumentation: such matters are valuable con-

appoggiaturas

tributions to the style; but they are not the style. than the parts.

The whole

is

greater

The style most widely appropriate to baroque music is less massive but more incisive than that in which my generation grew up. It is vivid
yet relaxed; glowing yet transparent. It sparkles and it dances, alive with natural ease and unforced conviction. It charms like a smile, and
it

cuts like a knife.

The

less

we

inflate it the stronger

it

sounds. Even

the best baroque music can be made ponderous by overweighting it, but its true nature is as volatile as its performers can possibly conceive

most impulsive moods. Contrary to some modern opinion, there is nothing unimpulsive, and nothing dry, about an authentic rendering of early music. That such an opinion should have arisen was understandable and valuable earlier in the twentieth century when the most pressing necessity was to escape from the incongruous influence of post-Wagnerian weight, sonority and smoothness. But this escape has now virtually been accomplished, and our present danger is not too little austerity but too much. We
of
it

in their

early music of the sheer animal vitality which carries all genuine musical performance along as nature always needs to carry along and underwrite the achievements of culture.

are in

some danger of depriving

a magnificence of storm and stress which is part of Wagner's musical language. But there is also a poise and a crispness and a crystalline translucency shared by composers as unlike in other respects
is

There

as Monteverdi

and

Vivaldi, as Purcell

and Couperin,
less

as

Bach and

Handel. This baroque brand of eloquence is not the romantic variety. To match up to the
all

impassioned than baroque intentions in our

interpretation does not, as is sometimes mistakenly suggested,

mean

all our richest colourings of renouncing tone. It does mean applying them appropriately to the matter in hand, the etched and the mood unaffected and direct. keeping style sharply It does mean the reconciling complementary requirements of passion and of serenity.
is a mere escape into fantasies of unbroken serenity in some past golden age: fantasies just as comfortable and illusory as our by now untenable and discarded Victorian fantasies of unbroken progress. There has never been an age of 30

our warmest feelings and

Ignoring the passion in early music

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

unqualified serenity or unqualified passion; these are two extremes of human experience which the art of living consists in more or less

the art of music, like the plastic and literary arts, very largely consists in showing how they can be reconciled. It is this reconciliation of opposites achieved by the composer in Ms
successfully reconciling.

And

so necessary for our interpretation to carry faithfully into effect. All great music achieves it, but not all in the same way.
it is

music which

The

simply along chronological divisions. It is personality rather than period which separates the other-worldliness of Palestrina from the earthy immediacy of Monteverdi, the rich homelilie

differences

do not

ness of

Haydn from

Schubert from
like Vivaldi

the profound lucidity of Mozart, the lyricism of the indomitability of Beethoven. There are extraverts
J. S.

or Handel and introverts like Purcell or

Bach

in

any

age. Brahms and Wagner and Debussy are all of the nineteenth century; Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Vaughan- Williams and Bartok are all

of the twentieth. Their solutions to the equation are various in the extreme; but not the elements in the equation. Pain and joy, suffering
particularly the bittersweet triumph of accepting adversity as part of our human lot: these are the ingredients, and we all mix them differently according to our
delight, adversity

and

and triumph, and more

manner of experience.
Nevertheless there are

and the remarkable hold which this period has now gained on our affections is certainly not due to its having run away from one end of our human paradox by divorcing passion from serenity or keeping music unemotional. Not even Stravinsky (least of all Stravinsky) does this, although he seems to think he does. The hold which baroque music has gained over our affections is due precisely to the fact that its most typical composers, from the supreme case of J. S. Bach downwards, had each in their degree the secret of not only balancing the passion and serenity, but balancing them at a high level of intensity. Bach's music is very passionate and very serene, not in crude alternation, but as an integrated whole. If ever there was a case of transcending the opposites in a reconciliation which is more than the sum of its parts, that case is Bach's music. This is the measure of
such a
style,

up

better than others.

some styles which seem able to balance them What we call the baroque period of music had

our problem in doing justice to him with our interpretation. Because the question of how emotional our interpretation of early music ought to be is a primary question which takes precedence even

over the more complex question of how to apply the right kind of emotion in the right kind of way, I have collected a variety of evidence
bearing on it. This is followed by a few further quotations to remind us of the tranquility which is the complementary aspect. I have then
31

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

been able to find one or two In which the reconciliation of the paradox, normally so unconsciously achieved, has to some extent broken through into conscious description. I believe the reader may find a comparison of these passages helpful in establishing the underlying mood which is our
best starting-point. (For fuller bibliographical detail see Bibliography.)
2.

THE ELEMENT OF PASSION IN EARLY MUSIC

of Musik, London, 1636,
p. 109, citing

(1) Charles Butler, Principles

the fifth-century St. Augustine:

me

Songs, being vehemently moved with die voices of thy sweet-sounding Church. Those Voices did pierce mine ears, and thy truth distilled into mine heart; and thereby was inflamed in

*O how I wept at thy Hymns and

a love of Piety: the tears trickled down, and with them

case/

was

in

happy
(2)

William Prynne, Histriomastix, London, 1633, Ch.

XX,

citing the

twelfth-century Bishop Ethelred:

'Whence hath the Church so many Organs and Musicall Instruments? To what purpose, I pray you, is that terrible blowing of Belloes, expressing rather the crakes of Thunder, than die sweetnesse of a voyce? To what
purpose serves that contraction and inflection of the voyce? This man sings a base, that a small meane, another a treble, a fourth divides and cuts asunder, as it were, certaine middle notes. One while the voyce is strained, anon it is remitted, now it is dashed, and then againe it is inlarged with a
is

it is enforced into a horse's neighings; sometimes, die masculine vigour being laid aside, it is sharpened into the shrilnesse of a woman's voyce; now and then it is

lowder sound. Sometimes, which

shame

to speake,

writhed, and retorted with a certaine artificiall circumvolution. Sometimes

sing, but, as it were, to breathe out his last in his breath, and by a certaine gaspe, by shutting ridiculous interception of his voyce, as it were to threaten silence, and now to imitate the agonies of a again dying man, or the extasies of such as suffer/

thou may'st see a

man with

an open mouth, not to

Thomas Hoby, London,

(3) Baldassare Castiglione,

The Courtyer, Venice, 1528,

transl. Sir

1561,

Everyman

ed. 1928, p. 61

heaven.

'Marke me musicke, wherein are harmonies sometime of a base sound and slow, and otherwhile verie quicke and of new devises, yet doe they all recreate a man, but for sundrie causes, as a man may perceive in the manner of singing that Bido useth, which is so artificall, cunning, vehement, stirred, and such sundrie melodies, that the of the hearers move all spirites and are inflamed, and so listing, a man would weene they were lift up into

And no
with a more

lesse

doth our Marchetto Cara

soft

harmony, that by a 32

move in his singing, but delectable way and full of mourning

THE APPROACH TO EARLY

sweetcnes maketh tender and percetli the mind, and sweetly imprinteth
in
it

a passion full

of great

delite/

(4)

Myles Coverdale, Goostly Psalmes, London,

:

[? 1539], preface

'Unto the Christen reader*

*

Yf yonge men also that have

in soch

had some love unto hym, for truly as we love, so synge we: and where our affeccyon is, .* thence conuneth our myrth and joye
sparks
that they also
.

wholsome balettes ... of Gods love in theyr hertes, and

.

the gyfte of syngynge, toke theyr pleasure it were a token, both that they felt some

(5)

Charles Butler, Principles of Musik, London, 1636, p. 92:

'[Good composing is impossible] unless the Author, at the time of Composing, be transported as it were with some Musical fury; so that himself scarce knoweth what he doth, nor can presently give a reason for
his doing.' (6)

Samuel Pepys, Diary, 27 Feb., 1667/8:

'That which did please me beyond any thing in the whole world was the wind-musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife;

nor all the evening going home, and at home, to think of any thing, but remained all night transported.'
that neither then,
(7)

was able

Angelo Berardi, Ragionamenti Musicali, Bologna, 1681,

is

p. 87:

'Music
(8)

the ruler of the passions of the soul.'

Frangois Raguenet, Comparison between the French and Italian Music, 1702 ? transl. ? J. E. Galliard, 1709, ed. O. Strunk, Mus. Quart.,

XXXII,

3, July,
is]

1946, p. 422:
.
.

.' enchantment and extasy of pleasure with any man that suffered his [Translator's f.n. p. 419:] 1 never met was playing on the violin passions to hurry him away so much whilst he as the famous Arcangelo Corelli, whose eyes will sometimes turn as red as fire; his countenance will be distorted, his eyeballs roll as in an agony, and he gives in so much to what he is doing that he doth not look like the

'[Music

transport,
9

same man/
(9)

Dr. Charles Burney, Present State of Music

II, p.

in

Germany, London,

1773,

269:
at the clavichord] but looked like

'[C.P.E.

Bach

one inspired. not only played, distilled from underlip fell, and drops of effervescence 33

grew

so animated

and possessed, that he His eyes were fixed, his

his countenance.

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

He
said, If he

were

to be set to

work

he should frequently, in this manner,

grow young
(10) C.

again.'
Biainville,
falls

H.

V Esprit de

Art Musical, Geneva, 1754, p. 14:

*A musician
it;

his

imagination
his

without

blood pulses rapidly volition; a luminous cloud surrounds him, he is transported

is

into inspiration at the

moment when he least thinks of

his

fired, his heart swells,

into a vast space;

it is

that

which has

reality,

all his

senses lend

him

their

mutual aid, and are transformed piece by piece into passion, the image which he desires to paint; it all comes pressing upon him, he guides and selects. Exalted above himself, he traces, without knowing it, the beauties which he scarcely understands like a second Pythian, he falls into a frenzy, he speaks the language of the Gods; he is drained at last, the forces fail him; / he returns to himself
:

(11)

[J.

Mainwaring] Memoirs of.

Handel, London, 1760, p. 52:

'The audience was so enchanted with this performance, that a stranger who should have seen the manner in which they were affected, would have imagined they had all been distracted.'
3.

THE ELEMENT OF SERENITY IN EARLY MUSIC

Richard Allison, Howres Recreation in Musicke, London, 1606, foreword, citing the early sixteenth-century founder of the Reformation:
(12)

'Musicke, saith he [Martin Luther] to Divels we know is hateful and intolerable, and I plainely thinke, neither am I ashamed to averr it, that

next Theologie, there is no Arte comparable with Musicke: for it alone next to Theologie doth affect that, which otherwise only Theologie can
perforate, that
(13)
is

a quiet

and a cheareful minde/

Thomas

Sternhold, Psalter,

London, 1560,

title-page:

'Very mete to be used of all sorts of people privately for their godly solace and comfort, laiying aparte all ungodly songues and ballades which tende only to the nourishing of vice, and corrupting of youth /
. .

(14)

John Milton, Of Education, London, 1644,

.

ed. of 1836, p. 162:

.

'The solemn and divine harmonies of Music have a great power over dispositions and manners, to smoothe and make them gentle from rustic harshness and distempered passions.'
.

(15) Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de Musique, Paris, 1768, s.v* 'Imitation' :

'Night, sleep, solitude and silence are among the great pictures of music.'

34

THE APPROACH TO EARLY MUSIC

4.

RECONCILING THE PASSION WITH THE SERENITY

(16) Sir
ed., p. 79:

Thomas Browne,

Rellgio

MedicL London, 1542, Everyman

and I like it the better, to affect ail harmony, and sure there is musick even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a musick where ever there is a harmony, order or proportion 'Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim but against all Church-Musick. For my self, not only from my obedience, my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and TavernMusick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer. in it is of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an There something Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear, as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.'
"It is

my temper,

(17)

Thomas Mace, Mustek's Monument, London,

1676, p. 19:

(Oh which I was so transported, and wrapt up into High Contemplations, that there was no room left in my whole Man, viz. Body, Soul and Spirit, for any thing below Divine and Heavenly Raptures Musick speaks so transcendently, and Communicates Its *. [p. 118] Notions so Intelligibly to the Internal, Intellectual, and Incomprehensible Faculties of the Soul; so far beyond &&. Language of Words, that I confess, and most solemnly affirm, I have been more Sensibly, Fervently, and and Contemplations, Zealously Captivated, and drawn into Divine Raptures, by Those Unexpressible, Rhetorical, Uncontroulable Persuasions, and Instructions of Musicks Divine Language, than ever yet I have been, by the best Verbal Rhetorick, that came from any Mans Mouth, either in Pulpit, or
. .
.

That Vast-Conchording-Unity of the whole CongregationalChorus, came (as I may say) Thundering in, even so, as it made the very the unutterable ravishing Soul's delight!) In the Ground shake under us; 'But

when

elsewhere.

'Those

Influences,

which come along with

It,

may

Communications, or Distillations, Heavenly Genius, or Spirit; Mystically, and Unapprehensibly (yet Effectually) All Irregular Disturbing, and Unquiet Dispossessing the Soul, and Mind, of
to Emanations,

aptly be compar'd, of some Sweet, and

Motions; and
Tranquillity,

Stills,

and

Fills

It,

with

Quietness, Joy,

and Peace; Absolute

and Unexpressible

Satisfaction.'

35