Early music generally comprises Medieval music (500–1400) and Renaissance music (1400–1600), but can also include Baroque music (1600–1750). Originating in Europe, early music is a broad musical era for the beginning of Western classical music .
15-613: The Stour Music Festival is a festival of early music held in the Stour valley , Kent, England, founded by countertenor Alfred Deller in 1962. The principal venue is a medieval church, All Saints' Church, Boughton Aluph . The building has good acoustics and was used for some of Deller's recordings. After Deller's death in 1979, his son Mark Deller continued the festival, and celebrated its 50th birthday alongside his father's centenary in 2012. In 2020 Robert Hollingworth, known for his work with I Fagiolini , took over as festival director. In
30-488: A lecturer at Goldsmiths' College in 1972. In 1975 she was appointed professor at Brandeis University and in 1981 at Princeton University , and served as department chair in both. Bent was president of the American Musicological Society (1984–1986), of which she is now a Corresponding Member. She returned to England in 1992 as senior research fellow at All Souls College , University of Oxford , where she
45-632: A number of instrumental consorts and choral ensembles specialising in Early music repertoire were formed. Groups such as the Tallis Scholars , the Early Music Consort and the Taverner Consort and Players have been influential in bringing Early music to modern audiences through performances and popular recordings. The revival of interest in Early music has given rise to a scholarly approach to
60-425: 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 ". Margaret Bent Margaret Bent CBE FBA , (born Margaret Hilda Bassington; 23 December 1940) is an English musicologist who specializes in music of
75-607: Is now an emeritus fellow. Bent's research centers on English, French and Italian music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and includes work on the medieval motet . Her study of the Old Hall Manuscript (both her 1969 dissertation and the edition, co-edited with Andrew Hughes, published in the Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae , 1969–73), was a key work in scholarship on early English music. Her studies of John Dunstaple , Philippe de Vitry , Guillaume de Machaut ,
90-1001: The Roman de Fauvel , musica ficta and music and manuscripts in the Veneto, have all been highly influential; she was a pioneer in musical paleography and source studies. She co-founded and co-directed the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music serves on many editorial boards of journals and publication series and contributed articles to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . Her publications address technical matters of music theory, techniques of counterpoint, analysis, musica ficta, text-setting, and other issues that bridge notation and performance in early music, descriptions of new sources, aspects of musical transmission, stemmatics, and manuscript studies, interfaces with literary, historical and biographical questions. Her awards include
105-702: The Royal Historical Society and All Souls College, Oxford , a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America , a distinguished senior fellow of the School of Advanced Study , London University, an International member of the American Philosophical Society , and was appointed CBE in 2008. She was
120-755: The Royal Musical Association 's Dent Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship , a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship , the Frank Llewellyn Harrison Medal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland , the Claude V. Palisca award of the American Musicological Society , and honorary doctorates from the universities of Glasgow, Notre Dame and Montréal. She is a Fellow of the British Academy , Academia Europaea ,
135-623: The end of the 16th century. Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries would have understood Early music to range from the High Renaissance and Baroque, while some scholars consider that Early music should include the music of ancient Greece or Rome before 500 AD (a period that is generally covered by the term Ancient music ). Music critic Michael Kennedy excludes Baroque, defining Early music as "musical compositions from [the] earliest times up to and including music of [the] Renaissance period". Musicologist Thomas Forrest Kelly considers that
150-506: The essence of Early music is the revival of "forgotten" musical repertoire and that the term is intertwined with the rediscovery of old performance practice . 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
165-683: The initial years the festival exhibited paintings, organized by the painter John Ward. In 2003 it commissioned a new window for All Saints' Church to replace glass destroyed in the Second World War . 51°11′47″N 0°54′31″E / 51.196344°N 0.908679°E / 51.196344; 0.908679 This music festival-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Early music Interpretations of historical scope of "early music" vary. The original Academy of Ancient Music formed in 1726 defined "Ancient" music as works written by composers who lived before
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#1733085644223180-572: The late medieval and Renaissance eras. In particular, she has written extensively on the Old Hall Manuscript , English masses as well as the works of Johannes Ciconia and John Dunstaple . Bent was educated at the Acton Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls and Girton College , Cambridge University (where she read music, was organ scholar, and is now an honorary fellow), receiving her BA in 1962 and PhD in 1969. She taught at Cambridge and King's College London after 1963, and became
195-423: The performance of music. Through academic musicological research of music treatises , urtext editions of musical scores and other historical evidence, performers attempt to be faithful to the performance style of the musical era in which a work was originally conceived. Additionally, there has been a rise in the use of original or reproduction period instruments as part of the performance of Early music, such as
210-464: The performance of that music. Today, the understanding of "Early music" 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." In the later 20th century there was a resurgence of interest in the performance of music from the Medieval and Renaissance eras, and
225-423: The revival of the harpsichord or the viol . The practice of " historically informed performance " is nevertheless dependent on stylistic inference. According to Margaret Bent , Renaissance notation is not as prescriptive as modern scoring, and there is much that was left to the performer's interpretation: "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires
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