Exploring plurality of interpretation through annotations in the long 19th century: musician's perspectives and the FAAM project.
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Nicholas Cornia
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
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.
Look again
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Inês de Avena Braga, Claudio Ribeiro
connected to: KC Research Portal
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
It goes without saying that engaging with the ethos of early music demands a considerable amount of continuous research on the practices of the past, as most aspects of performance are not written in the score, and the understanding and usage of signs and other written indications have changed considerably over time. As curious musicians, research is not only a source of inspiration and innovation in our work but also a source of constant questioning and strengthening of our musical practices. Questions such as “is this actually true?” and “can I really say/do that?” are recurring, and, although these are not always fully or definitively answerable, we find it important to keep asking, going back to the sources and answering over and over again.
In this research, as part of the 2021 Lectorate ‘Music, Education and Society’ of the Royal Conservatoire The Hague, we will look again at well-known Italian sources and search for new sources of information on performance practice of music written in Italy in the first half of the 18th century (music methods, instructional writings and evidences in repertoire), without imposing our current practice on it, but being open to what these sources may say that is in shock with what we usually do or take for granted. What can we (re)learn about the performance practice of late 17th- and early 18th-century Italian music by going back to the sources? Our conclusions and inconclusions will hopefully stimulate a review of today’s performance practice and renew approaches on the research of performance practice.