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FoMRHI Cor*. 44
REVIEW: INSTRUMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE BY
DAVID MUNROW, 1976 and THE WORLD OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS BY JEREMY MONTAGU, 1976
E Segerman
Most scholars in the early music field feel that offering the products of research
to the concert and instrument-buying public as it happens is very naturai and healthy.
They are learning more and more about how and on what early music was really done,
and the performers and instrument makers are getting better and better at recreating
it. Thus. if mistakes are made in ignorance along the way and if there is a time lag
in the response of performers and instrument makers to the research because of
their investment in old ways, it will stili ali come out as authentic as can be in the
end. It is in this spirit that these books on early instruments were written.
For the scholars this practical realisation of their work is most stimulating, but
there is a very serious danger when we consider the effect of communication of false
information to the concert audience and the instrument buyers whose commitments are
primarily to musical appreciation and expression and only secondarily to historical accuracy.
The problem is one of initial aesthetic commitment, analagous to imprinting in
animai beahviour. Readers of Conrad Lorenz will know that baby geese will follow
the first nioving object they see after hatching, and if it happens to be Lorenz , the
real mother goose gets ignored. We ali know that first impressions are the most
lasting. I have been spoiled from enjoying the more authentic 6onorities of recent
performances of those Monteverdi pieces that moved me so when I first heard them
in the 1936 Nadia Boulanger recording . That recording is the only meaningful
performance for my personal aesthetics and this is most disturbing since I intellectually
know better.
As any propogandist knows. information offered to the public when they are highly
receptive to it sticks so tenaciously that subsequent refutations of errors can never
be more than partially effective. When people are shown that they have been misled
the usuai reaction is annoyance and rejection; the danger then is^when members of
the public realize that they have been misinformed,they will either turn away from
early music or reject authenticity as a significant factor to strive for (as has happened
with the folk music movement).
Both authors have acquired deep understanding of certain classes of early instruments
and could write authoritatively about these, but it is somewhat impossible to attempt
comprehensive books on early instruments when much of what is written involves the
interpretation of the work of others that the authors have not understood on such a
deep level. It is perhaps unfair that this review is written by me who can only claim
some compctence in the area of strings, an area in which the authors could be expected
to be the weakest. But since we ali agree on the supremacy of strings for 'serious'
early music, the needs for accuracy in this area are most pressing. A commentary
on the contentious points of the strings sections of both books was supposed to be part
of this review, but it is becoming so long and taking so much time (being the prime
reason for the delay in production of this issue) that it will needs be a separate
communication in the next issue.
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