Exploring plurality of interpretation through annotations in the long 19th century: musician's perspectives and the FAAM project.
(2024)
author(s): Nicholas Cornia
published in: Research Catalogue
The quest of reconciling scholarship and interpretative freedom has always been present in the early music movement discourse, since its 19th century foundations. Confronted with a plurality of performance practices, the performer of Early Music is forced to make interpretative choices, based on musicological research of the sources and their personal taste.
The critical analysis of the sources related to a musical work is often a time-consuming and cumbersome task, usually provided by critical editions made by musicologists. Such editions primarily focus on the composer's agency, neglecting the contribution of a complex network of professions, ranging from editors, conductors, amateur and professional performers and collectors.
The FAAM, Flemish Archive for Annotated Music, is an interdisciplinary project at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp that wishes to explore the possibilities of annotation analysis on music scores for historically informed musicians.
Annotations are a valuable source of information to recollect the decision-making process of musicians of the past. Especially when original musical recordings are not available, the marks provided by these performers of the past are the most intimate and informative connections between modern and ancient musicians.
Contrary to a purely scholarly historically informed practice approach, based on the controversial concept of authenticity, we wish to allow the modern performers to reconcile their practice with the one of their predecessors in a process of dialectic emulation, where artistic process is improved through the past but does not stagnate in it.
Reconstructing Verses by Henry Loosemore and John Coprario
(2020)
author(s): Helen Roberts
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
This exposition comprises a package of outputs from practice-led research around two unique pieces of instrumental music with winds from early seventeenth-century England. Along with the first critical performance edition and a world premiere recording of these two pieces, I present a detailed discussion of the investigation which informed the editorial process, focussing on three historical artefacts: MS Drexel 5469, the fragmentary source of the music in question; the Christ Church cornetts, two original instruments that may historically have been associated with performance of this type of repertoire; and the St Teilo organ, an instrument reconstructed after Tudor archaeological evidence and representative of the style of instrument in use when MS Drexel 5469 was compiled. I examine each artefact in turn, establishing the wider historical context of each and assessing the connections between all three. This process has not only shed new light on two pieces overlooked by historical performers until now, but raised important questions surrounding the performance of early-seventeenth century liturgical music in general.