LYING AWAKE in the disruption of my unreliable sleep patterns in the change back to Standard Time, I was thinking of the alboka and its apparent limit of a sixth and what could be done with it.
It occurred to me that the Anglo-Saxon style of lyre such as was famously found at Sutton-Hoo with its six strings and as represented elsewhere might have been played with similar musical strategies. The medieval would-be reconstructor and, in my opinion, actual creative improvisor instead Benjamin Bagby, in trying to imagine an improvisational practice for the use of medieval harps interestingly pointed to the African thumb pianos and their amazingly varied and creative use of them both as solo instruments and, especially, as accompanying instruments. His use of that kind of six-string lyre in his setting of medieval poetry, most famously Beowulf, is a good example. I don't for a second believe it is "authentic medieval music" but it is an artistically interesting and creative use of the materials that we can reliably know were what whatever music they made was made with. I'd love it if it led to a revival of live musical story telling in a language an audience can understand with that level of artistic creativity but that's not going to happen. We'll continue to get pop music junk because that's what people are given.
When I was a music student thinking seriously of going the route of musicology, especially being interested in the music of the late 14th and 15th century we were all obsessed with a quest for something we could never have really gotten, getting back to the original intent of how the composers of the music could have imagined their music. There is simply not enough information left for us to honestly determine that as being any one thing, any one authentic performance practice that can be reliably reproduced so as to give us the experience the composers intended. We can know there were things that that couldn't be but we have little information as to what it definitely would have been.* Nor do we know if most of the composers of that time had an expectation that their music would be performed and heard in any one way, if they, themselves may not have varied their music greatly on different occasions or times.
I got sick and tired of the disagreements and arguments and pretense that we could reliably do what so obviously couldn't be done and decided to concentrate on other aspects of music for which we could have that information, the music of now instead of the lost past. I still love the music of Francesco Landini, Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Pres as I imagine them to be and there are performances of those composers pieces in the form they come down to us that I love quite a lot but I don't regret avoiding getting tangled farther than I did in the wars and brawls and pretenses of that time and the creation of bogus phony "medieval" music performances that were as bad. Though it's been a while since anyone was suspected to have gotten into a duel to the death over such questions.
I'm also glad that I didn't participate in something I might have unwittingly contributed to, the cult of the Latin language liturgy through a promotion of "Gregorian chant." I love the Chant but the cult that grew up around that in the decades since I left college is a temptation to idolatry and absurdity and neo-fascist politics. I'd go into why this is keeping me awake at night but that's an off-line project that I and one of my oldest musical friends are involved in. I don't have his permission to discuss that.
* Worse, we don't know how any particular composer might have felt about the practice of other composers and musicians of that time who left information about their performance practice and whether or not they'd have wanted their music treated that way. I spent a lot of time with Conrad Paumann's examples of keyboard improvisational practice, Fundamentum Organisandi but, in the end, had no idea how the evidence he left in it would have been applied to the music of other composers I'd have been interested in.
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