Customer Reviews

The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century

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Bruce Haynes has created a great book for those wishing to have a further understanding of not only what made baroque music "tick" in its own day, but what efforts are being made to keep it ticking today. His efforts to show how we are still searching for how baroque musicians actually thought about and played the music of their time through the hazy mist of Romanticism and modernism is an eye opener, right down to the unruly audiences at operas and the cheers during pieces while being played. Also the high degree of improvisation which was required for many pieces for them to truly take off as they were originally meant to.

Plus, near and dear to my heart is the section on modern period composition and the mention of Vox Saeculorum, a modern guild for period composers. The future of "early" music is definitely moving forward, probably in ways that many have never dreamt of....

Bruce Haynes' THE END OF EARLY MUSIC is a book about the historical performance movement, its aims and philosophy and its place in the modern musical scene. Haynes traces HIP (historically informed performance) in history, contrasting its philosophy with the romantic mindset which preceded it (which included the notions of absolute music, canonism, and the "transparent performer"). But Haynes' book is not simply a polemic against "mainstream" (i.e. non-historically informed) ways of performing older music; he outlines and critiques different trends within HIP itself, coming down squarely on the side of what he calls the Eloquent Style, a "passionate oratorical manner...based on declamation and gestural phrasing".

Part I of the book is brilliant. Haynes outlines what he discerns as the three successive styles of playing early music in the 20th century. The grand romantic manner, with its swooping portamento and rhythmic liberties, was a carry-over from the previous century. In reaction to this, and influenced by the "objectivist" aesthetic of Stravinsky, a new "Modernist" style developed in the 1930's that was extremely precise, literalistic, and emotionally detached (this is the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields variety of baroque performance). This style, stiff, mechanical, lacking in inflection, was far worse than Romantic Baroque; Haynes considers it an analogue to the mechanized standardization of the Industrial Revolution. The 1960's saw the beginnings of the Period Style which is now practiced by HIP musicians all over the world. Haynes further divides Period Style into two trends -Straight Style (or "Modern Lite", as he calls it), and the Eloquent Style, which Haynes feels represents the true baroque aesthetic.

As a historical performance student and performer, I am in fundamental agreement with Haynes' ideas, even if I have quibbles with certain particulars. Although the book has "early music" in the title, it is pretty much limited to baroque music, Haynes' area of specialization; Haynes does not make it clear how much of what he says is also applicable to Renaissance or Classical music. Moreover, it is hardly a "history of music", as the subtitle proclaims, but rather a history of musical interpretation from the romantic era to the present with the baroque era as the point of reference.

At times Haynes could have chosen his words better. As a Catholic, I was dismayed by the language he used in comparing the romantic concert to religious ritual in the chapter "Classical Music's Coarse Caress": "Music of this type thus risks becoming liturgy, UNTHINKING AND UNPROVOCATIVE [my emphasis]...Ritual actions are those that, because they are often repeated, lose the meaning they once possessed, and become automatic". I don't know what Haynes' religious convictions are, but he should have chosen his words more carefully here so as not to offend.

Haynes seems unwilling to give the 19th century any credit whatsoever, and occasionally his claims left me with some questions. For instance, he claims that the 19th-century bred a literalistic approach to the score along with the idea of the performer as mere "executant" of the composer's wishes. But how is this to be squared with the notion of romantic performers using compositions as vehicles for soul-searching personal expression? Elsewhere Haynes rails against the idea of canonism, or playing an exclusive list of compositions by "dead composers". But surely it was precisely romanticism's rejection of the ephemeral music-making of previous eras that allowed the early music revival to take place? On one occasion, Haynes seems blatantly to contradict himself. On p. 220 he criticizes HIP performances of Beethoven and romantic music for not sounding like the recordings of the early years of the 20th century, while earlier on the same page he had suggested that those early recordings don't represent an authentic Beethovenian performing style to begin with.

Other complaints I had were in the niceties of style. Haynes has developed a whole lexicon of names for the concepts he describes (Eloquent Style, Strait Style) and for the most part they work nicely (though the term "musicking" strikes me as silly). But he frequently refers to "Classical music" when it's clear he means "classical music" (the capital "C" indicates the Classical style period, whereas the lower-case "c" indicates "serious" or "art" music). Haynes' tone is informal, to the point of writing "kids" instead of "children" and "paper" instead of "newspaper". In general, the book could have been more carefully edited.

All in all, this is an important and very readable book on the fascinating subject of musical interpretation.

Bruce Haynes latest book "The End of Early Music" is superb, and applicable to those of us in the Period music field, as well as to all classical musicians and classical music organization administrators. As we all struggle for audience and relevance, this book can provide context and challenge. Recommended without any reservation.

A provoking book which should be read by all practising musicians. It is also accessable to the general music lover who is interested in the nature, history and development of musical interpretation, mainly through the copious musical examples which are not simply printed. They can be accessed and heard through internet links.

How and why do 'schools' of musical interpretation develop over a period and then transform into something different? You will be left thinking about this and other related topics when you have read and absorbed this book.Julian Mincham

The words of the book are interesting, although in my case Bruce Haynes is preaching to the choir. But a shame about the many musical examples available from the OUP publishers site: I live in New Zealand and we just don't have enough bandwidth to play the examples. So I think I missed out on a lot of the argument. Consider your internet connectivity before buying, expecially if you do not live in North America.

As a dedicated music lover and activist, once I heard the gorgeous sonorities of baroque music performed in high fidelity sound I was hooked. I bit harder when I played viola in local ensembles, and when the great radio music host, Robert J. Luertsema (WGBH-Boston) began his comprehensive playing of all available G.P. Telemann oeuvre in 1981 - celebrating the tricentennial of Telemann's birth.

Unfortunately, by that time the period instrument movement was taking over. It created an elite private domain for aficionados that excluded the general musical public. Soon the rewarding custom for virtuoso soloists (violin, piano, oboe, cello, etc.) to begin concerts with a baroque work disappeared, because failure to perform in antique modes would be noted archly as "conservative" by wet-finger-in-the-air newspaper critics. Cognoscenti: I respect your commitment but you may as well stop reading because mine is to the larger musical community.

Bizarre practices flourished, like a vocal soloist with lovely restrained vibrato being accompanied by strings with ostentatiously vibrato-less, flat sound; the Keuken brothers played Geminiani works in similar manner - although Geminiani explicitly exhorted players in his violin method of 1752 to use vibrato. I grieved over the obscuring of beautiful melody with fussy, "correct" ornamentation, and the fragmentation of languorous slow movements with chopped notes.

Now let me admit - I can't figure out from the encomiums of the publisher's review or the single personal reviewer where Haynes stands on all this. Is he going to call spades spades or digging implements? Is he going to unmask the ridiculous prohibitions on electronic amplification so fine baroque groups can go on the road and not just play where some mycaenas subsidizes performance? Is he going to allow us to take back the glorious development of the violin in the last 250 years? Does he really think Beethoven would have settled for a fortepiano if he had had a Steinway at his disposal?

Somebody tell me more and I may buy the book!