At the Dawn of 2010: Old Music, New Music

EIGHT AUDIO PIECES (ALL MUSIC)   We've digested our Christmas goose and sung our fa-la-las. Now we're surveying the corpses of New Year's resolutions gone by and pondering other ways to bolster our virtue in the coming year. In other words, that which was once new and is now old can, at the dawn of a new year, be new again. In this vein, some classical music works and recordings spring to mind. Although Father Time is relentless in frog-marching us to the ultimate finish line, I hope you'll take just a moment to join me in a little diversion through some classical works and recordings that make the passing of time seem beautiful, alluring, even funky. The passing of an old year into a new one calls to mind the ebb and flow of musical styles.  In music, as in all things sensual, the tastes of the moment reign supreme. Johann Sebastian Bach - famous today as one of the "Three Bs" - wrote in a style that by the time of his death was already outdated. The music of the Renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was on the cutting edge of fashion during his lifetime but often sounds irretrievably archaic to us today. The authentic performance practice movement did much to bring Monteverdi's music to the fore. However, it also arguably did much to distance this repertory from our times: our modern instruments are not like the ones on which musicians strummed, plucked and pounded in Monteverdi's day, and we likely sing differently now than they did back then, so performing Monteverdi's music on period instruments can make it sound foreign to our ears. But the period-instrument ensemble L'Arpeggiata (about which I've blogged here and here) and a clutch of the worlds best singers of early music make a couple of Monteverdi's monodies sound new again on their 2009 recording Teatro d'Amore. Listen to these cats swing on Monteverdi's Ohimè, ch'io cado: [audio:monteverdi_ohime.mp3] We've got lutes, at least one theorbo, cornetti (the trumpet's exceedingly difficult-to-play ancestor, the cornetto) and, yes, something like a drum set. Monteverdi certainly never imagined his music performed this way, but this old wine flows smoothly from its new bottle. The band gives another of Monteverdi's monodies, Chiome d'oro, a modern-day makeover: [audio:monteverdi_chiome.mp3] From the standpoint of performance practice, this Jazz-Age tarting-up is, to put it mildly, an unusual approach to Monteverdi's music. But Monteverdi scored his opera L'Orfeo for everything but the kitchen sink, so why not stick a drum set into some of his monodies? Did it make you tap your feet? Did the spirit of Miles Davis descend upon you during the improv sets between verses? If so, the interpretation worked. Period. Move on. Speaking of jazz improvisation, let's turn the clock back to the fourteenth century. Years ago Ensemble P.A.N. (Project Ars Nova) released Ars Magis Subtiliter, a recording of music in the finicky, late-fourteenth-century ars subtilior style. Ensemble P.A.N.'s introduction to Johannes Symonis' Puisque je suis fumeux has the feel not of a Medieval court, but of a Manhattan lounge in the era of  Ornett Coleman: [audio:symonis_fumeux.mp3] Let's stay in the late Middle Ages for a moment. The French composer Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377) is known for his large body of poetry and chansons on courtly love themes, as well as for his setting of the Mass Ordinary - the first complete Mass setting in history. The 2008 recording Scattered Rhymes (with Paul Hillier leading the Orlando Consort and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir) features music by Machaut and Renaissance composer Guillaume DuFay alongside living composers' interpretations of them.  Here's some of Machaut's virelai Douce dame jolie from that recording: [audio:machaut_douce.mp3] Now hear how present-day composer Tarik O'Regan's Virelai: Douce dame jolie, his take on Machaut's chanson, straddles the divide between the world of gothic cathedrals and that of concrete skyscrapers. The dissonance at the beginning of O'Regan's work sounds at once primitive and postmodern and opens into a groove that could only have come from the twentieth century: [audio:oregan_virelai.mp3] And the groove bubbles on to the work's conclusion: [audio:oregan_virelai_end.mp3] Then there's Rolf Lislevand's new recording, Dimnutio. Lislevand explores with his colleagues the Renaissance practice of embellishing a melody by playing it more quickly and with notes of shorter rhythmic value. The development of this practice, Lislevand writes in his notes for the recording, particularly affected how musicians conceptualized playing plucked stringed instruments. What most intrigues me is that he and his group achieve with this ancient music a sound both archaic and new - indeed New Age (remember the New Age Hildegard von Bingen craze of the 1990s?).  As beautiful as it is, I expect to hear a rain stick in the background on this performance of Vincenzo Capirola's Ricercata prima: [audio:diminutio_1.mp3] And wouldn't Ravi Shankar's sitar soundly oddly at home in Joan Ambrosio Dalza's Piva?: [audio:diminutio_2.mp3] You get the idea. With such novel interpretations of such old music, why all the chatter about "classical" music's being on its deathbed? Newsflash: it is not. These artists affirm that art music is alive and well and, indeed, ever reinventing itself.  As a new year dawns, do you care to join it?