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Early music is a term used to describe pre-Classical Western music, from the earliest written music to 1500 at the earliest (Judd, 1998, p.4) and the end of the Baroque era in about 1750 at the latest.
Music in Antiquity
Very little remains of music from Ancient Greece or Rome. The epics of Homer and the lyrics of Sappho, for instance, were meant to be sung with instrumental accompaniment, but nothing remains of their scores. Fragments of Greek music are, however, extant, most notably scraps from tragedy (a choral song by Euripides for his Orestes and an instrumental intermezzo from Sophocles' Ajax), a few hymns by Mesomedes of Crete (second century AD), and the Seikilos epitaph (dated variously between the 2nd century BCE and 1st century AD). Of Roman music, there remains but one meagre scrap: a line from Terence's Hecyra set to music by his composer Flaccus. All music of antiquity is monophonic, as polyphony is an invention of the Middle Ages.
Post-Antiquity
For information on early music post-Antiquity, see the following articles:
Authentic performance
The term "early music" is closely associated with the concept of authentic performance. The authentic performance movement began with the performance of early music, and in general, the earlier the music, the more likely it is that its performers will show an interest in authentic performance as it becomes more difficult for the reason listed below and others.
Notation and performance
According to Margaret Bent (1998), Early music notation, "is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness." Before about 1600, written music did not consistently state which instruments are used when. A century earlier, people who wrote down music did not always specify whether lines of polyphony were to be sung or played on an instrument. Similarly, the notation frequently does not indicate what key to play the music in, if any. Accidentals were not necessary. Notations for rhythm go back only to about 1200. There is thus a speculative element to all modern performances of Medieval and Renaissance music. However, Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score, "what modern notation requires [accidentals] would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint." See the article on Renaissance music.
See also
Sources
- Judd, Cristle Collins (ed.) (1998). Tonal Structures of Early Music. New York: Garland Publishing. ISBN 0815323883.
- Judd, Cristle Collins. "Introduction: Analyzing Early Music".
- Bent, Margaret. "The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis".
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