Abstract
Since the revival of Historically Informed Performance in the 1960s, the interpretation of Early Music has continuously raised questions many of which remain unanswered. Nevertheless, understanding of earlier practice continues to grow and performers have long surpassed the strict historical urtext approach that initially prevailed, largely due to the growing body of evidence that instrumentalists of earlier times relied heavily on aurally transmitted improvised musical traditions, which can only be re-imagined today. The modern musician must also improvise in order to reconstitute or re-invent missing elements belonging to a long-forgotten tradition. From a philosophical point of view, therefore, the performance of early music today is closely related to hermeneutics, and the multiple questions involved in the interpretative process.
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Notes
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The CD “Poulenc au Moyen Âge”, by the French ensembles Mescolanza and Les Zippoventilés illustrates this tendency [3].
- 2.
I refer here to the interpretation of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme staged by Benjamin Lazar and interpreted by Le Poème Harmonique. In search of a form of reenactment, the piece is reconstituted in all its dimensions, which also implies for instance the lightings of the time, made of candles. The artists played with shadows and light in an expressive way, which has only been possible through their to attempt to reconstruct and understand the work. The Reconstitution of the diction by Eugene Green also, according to the director Benjamin Lazar, proposed new forms of interpretations, and La Comédie franse. The work as a whole cannot be fully grasped when omitting the musical part, which is crucial to its integrity (http://fresques.ina.fr/en-scenes/fiche-media/Scenes00285/le-bourgeois-gentilhomme-mis-en-scene-par-benjamin-lazar-au-theatre-l-apostrophe-de-pontoise.html).
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We are grateful to Jonathan Bell for his French-English translation.
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Ferrando, J. (2018). Reading Early Music Today: Between Reenactment and New Technologies. In: Aramaki, M., Davies , M., Kronland-Martinet, R., Ystad, S. (eds) Music Technology with Swing. CMMR 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11265. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01692-0_43
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