No other ‚historical’ music is thus fated to absorb such intense projections and fantasies from its modern performers. Medieval song, having no living traditions except the ones we create for it, thrives even in the harshest of environments and adapts easily to the disguises performers require it to inhabit. For some of these performance modes, technical ability (to play an instrument well or sing in tune with a consistent production) is not considered essential. However, in today’s world of medieval music one can also encounter the concert experience as pretentious pseudo-liturgy as ironic, edgy cabaret as ponderous mystery play or cute, costumed courtly entertainment as ecstatic ethnic percussion session as extravagantly-orchestrated symphonic poem as dutiful list of dry musical examples as SCA free-for-all, etc.
These are performances in which one feels a true ‚authenticity,’ and even a closeness to the original musicians, poets and singers who were once ‚modern’ and for whom the term ‚Middle Ages’ did not exist. Many of these performances are given by serious musicians who have dedicated their lives to the thoughtful study of the texts and sources, and to integrating their study of performance practice into a living and expressive art the most outstanding of these soloists and ensembles transcend being merely ‚historically informed’ and reach out to their audience with performances which touch the listener’s soul and which, in a way, make irrelevant that fact that the musical sources are 700 years old or more. Still, this situation does not discourage people from listening to recordings of medieval monophonic song and attending live concerts, the majority of which present medieval repertoires in the guise of a straightforward and polished chamber music concert. We sometimes may know how this music was performed, but we will never know how it sounded. Over the years, generations of musicians have tried to bring these repertoires back to life, with predictably uneven results. Monophonic song is situated at the volatile crossroads of oral tradition and the scriptorium, of voices and instruments, of Latin and the vernacular, and is the principal vehicle for musical practices which rarely, if ever, were described by medieval musicians in a manner that speaks to our condition. I refer here to monophonic song – including Western liturgical chant – since these are the repertoires which have provoked the most debate (and discord) among proponents of various theories of how such music might have sounded 700, 800 or even 1000 years ago. However, the situation becomes much more complex and clouded when we seek to perform medieval song, especially from the period before ca. This is challenging enough in the cases of most early European repertoires, but it has obviously not kept generations of performers and scholars from fashioning a thriving early music scene, complete with venerated living musicians and identifiable traditions, so that our vision of the past seems bright and clear. (And of course, there is always the terrifying sub-scenario of this time-machine fantasy: what would happen if we had access to the original sound and to the master’s living art, but we simply did not like what we heard?) Deprived of this essential face-to-face musical experience, we are forever doomed to confront our own past musical cultures ‘through a glass darkly.’
Barring the discovery of time-travel, we shall never meet our master. Unfortunately, all of this documentation, which we performers assiduously track down and study, is forever missing the one crucial element of musical performance which we would most need and desire to possess: the actual sound, the presence of a living master.
The concept of ‘historically informed performance’ thrives on the conviction that today’s musicians can find knowledge and instruction in the documentation which has survived from past musical practices: musical notation, descriptions of performance situations, treatises, methods, visual representations of music-making, playable instruments, etc.
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