Music has a long history of being both a user and a driver of
technological innovations. In the fourteenth century, pipe organs
may have been the most mechanically complicated devices being
produced.
The early music movement as we know it today is a loose
confederation of academics, instrument makers, and performers,
both amateur and professional, exploring the music of other times.
It can be argued that the current form of this confederation was
enabled by the invention of the xerox machine. Before that, the
academics were producing editions of renaissance and baroque music
in giant tomes which didn't fit on a music stand. So in order
to have your recorder group play it, you had to copy it out as
many times as you needed for eveyone to see it, which took more
commitment than most people have to music they've never heard
before. Now, if you want to try a piece, you xerox the right
number of copies.
Early musicians use computers (LINUX-based and otherwise) for
much the same things that anyone else does. Email makes the
worldwide hospitality network function much more smoothly. The
existence of various music publishing tools makes it much easier
to produce an edition of a given piece of music when there are no
published ones, or they don't meet your needs. Instrument makers
love computer graphics and tuning tools.
Below are some links which I hope will be helpful in exploring
this subject. Please feel free to email me if you know of
others which should be here.
This one was actually one of the first web pages I ever looked at. It
had been discussed on the rec.music.early newsgroup some time before I
got internet access. It was a while before I found anything else on
the web as good as the Vatican Library site.
The Music
Hall of the Vatican Library site has some very beautiful
Renaissance manuscripts on display.
This site bills itself as
"The largest reference for European Medieval and Renaissance
music on the web".
This
one has everything you ever wanted to know about recorders,
with a lot of links to other related areas.
My music
publishing page is mostly Renaissance polyphony in unbarred
parts, done in ABC on my LINUX box. The ABC page points to
+several other people using ABC to
typeset early music, even if you make a distinction between
early and traditional music, which many performers do not. MusiXTeX and related
programs are another route to typesetting music under LINUX.
Lilypond
is another publishing system which can be used for
early music.
Christian Mondrup publishes the music he
arranges for his recorder group in MusiXTeX and Lilypond.
The Choral Public Domain
Library has a huge collection of Choral sheet music, and also
links to lots of other free sheet music sites.
The
Journal of Seventeenth Century Music is a fairly advanced
piece of electronic publishing.
My friend Alain Naigeon is a recorder player who investigates
articulation and phrasing by creating MIDI files of his favorite
Renaissance works, and composes imitations of Renaissance
forms. The different
tuning systems used in different periods are easier to experiment
with because of computer tuning programs, such as this
one.
Early Music and Technology
Links to Early Music-related computer (not necessarily LINUX)
projects
Publishing
MIDI
Laura Conrad
Early Music Mini Guide Early Music is generally regarded as music being within the span of ancient chants to the Baroque - a huge span of time (around 600 AD to 1650ish AD to the start of the Baroque period). Needless to say a millenium of music covers many different types and styles. In the Western Tradition the Church is the foundation for most of this - from the early monophonic chants through the wonderful flowing lines of a Josquin de Pre mass to the rich polyphony of Palestrina. There are huge differences of style and complexity here! Sub groups include the music of the Middle Ages, The Renaissance, and the Baroque period. Interestingly Renaissance music originated and developed in Northern France and Belgium (Josquin de Pre, from this period, was a Fleming and was in demand in Italy for his ability to fill a church with music with quite small choirs.) Middle Ages music is subdivided into Gregorian chant, Ars antiqua, Ars nova, and Bergundian school. The Baroque? (aka 'thoroughbass period') We're getting closer to home now and you've probably heard of Bach and Handel to name but two of many. And I always think of Mozart as straddling the border to Classicism (well, listen!) even though he was born in 1756. The next great period of music is described as Classic and includes Beethoven. The Classic period is deemed to have started in 1750.