Early music

Early music is music, especially Western art music, composed prior to the Classical era. The term generally comprises Medieval music (500–1400) and Renaissance music (1400–1600), but can also include Baroque music (1600–1760), and, according to some authorities such as Kennedy (who excludes Baroque),Ancient music (before 500 AD). According to the UK's National Centre for Early Music, the term "early music" refers to both a repertory (European music written between 1250 and 1750 embracing Medieval, Renaissance and the Baroque) – and a historically informed approach to the performance of that music. However, today this term has come to include "any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed on the basis of surviving scores, treatises, instruments and other contemporary evidence."

Revival

Performance practice

According to Margaret Bent, "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness. Accidentals … may or may not have been notated, but what modern notation requires would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint".

Early Music (journal)

Early Music is a peer-reviewed academic journal specialising in the study of early music. It was established in 1973 and is published quarterly by Oxford University Press. The editor in chief is Francis Knights.

Early Music (Lachrymæ Antiquæ)

Early Music (Lachrymæ Antiquæ) (the subtitle means "Ancient Tears" in Latin) is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet, containing 21 compositions, many of which written, arranged, or transcribed for the quartet. The title track is from Dowland's Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares of 1604.

Compositions

The album contrasts adaptations for string quartet of music from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance with 20th-century compositions. The earliest piece is by the ninth-century Byzantine abbess, poet and composer Kassia; the most recent pieces are by the twentieth-century composers John Cage, Alfred Schnittke, and Arvo Pärt. Arranging and selecting compositions from ten centuries of music was intended, according to David Harrington, the quartet's founder, "to find a way of relating vastly different pieces to one time, to find a place in time where the elements meet." Harrington described the contrast between old and new music as crucial to the quartet: "There are moments when the music could have come out of the Middle Ages; there are other moments when it sounds like it's coming out of the Vietnam War, let's say. That contrast is something we've been working with for a long time." Allan Kozinn, writing in The New York Times, describes the album as a concept album in which "the distinctions between old and new are blurred, and the effect is comforting rather than disconcerting."