Talk:Early music

Statutory perpetual copyright

Early Music says:

(except that protected by a statutory perpetual copyright in one or more Berne Convention signatories

I've never ever heard of such a thing as a 'statutory perpetual copyright'... -- SJK

Some countries' laws (but not the US; see US Const. 1.8.8) provide for a perpetual copyright on specific works.

For instance, the UK has one on Peter Pan works by Barrie.

See also the following:

• Wikipedia article public domain
• Bono Act on E2
• Google search for |"peter pan" "perpetual copyright"|

--Damian Yerrick

Early music is in the public domain, but OTOH, early music notation is very different from modern music notation. (Heck, just putting it that way is a little deceptive; there is no single early music notation.) Early music notation doesn't indicate dynamics or articulation, and even omits some accidentals (the so-called "musica ficta") much like vowels in Semitic languages. (The notion is that "everybody knows" that if you don't apply the accidental, a dissonance results, so why write it in?) Early music notation time signatures, where they even exist, are quite different--the same note shape is used for the subdivision of the beat ("prolation") whether it's duple or triple, which will certainly throw off modern notation readers. A modern edition of an early music piece thus requires significant knowledge and editorial judgment, and such editions typically are copyrighted. (That's not to say that someone working from the original manuscripts or fascimiles thereof can't make a public domain or copylefted edition in modern notation, just that just because the original is PD, derived works aren't necessarily PD.)

Does Lilypond support the more common of the old notations? In that case, would it be possible to write a program that uses heuristic methods to convert the old notations to the less-ambiguous modern notation? --Damian Yerrick

Notation and performance

This sentence seems untrue or at least inaccurate:

• "Early music notation is, by current standards, very sketchy."

As the article explains:

• "Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score."

Early music musicians, composers, and transcribers had a "contract" just as we do today, with contemporary musicians being trained with the knowledge necessary to interpret contemporary notation. Hyacinth 07:16, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Furthermore, the term "dyadic counterpoint" is a strange term and doesn't really relate to the rest of the paragraph. How about a reference to Musica ficta and notes inegales instead? Wahoofive 00:43, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Does a redirect to an explination (polyphony) help? Hyacinth 21:49, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Eras in music history

The sidebar on "eras in music history" shows the "early music" era as 1500-1750. Surely that's not what you mean. Early music starts more like 1100.

That is Template:European art music eras. Hyacinth 01:12, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Now it claims that Early Music ends in 1600, when I've never seen a practitioner exclude the Baroque from Early Music. Where do they make this stuff up? Greg 07:56, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

True! I'll change it! Lfjslohll (talk) 18:10, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Classical music?

Why is early music said to be classical music? Early musicians generally take the attitude that they are doing pre-classical music, i.e. music up to and including the Baroque. It's classical musicians who think that early music is a kind of classical music. Greg 05:13, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps you are confusing European classical music and the Classical music era. Hyacinth 17:09, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I assure you that *I* am not the one confused. Greg 07:57, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

It's also interesting to note that early music performers often perform what might be considered "popular music" from earlier times. The distinction between pop music and serious music, while perhaps less important in former times, is virtually ignored in most early-music contexts. —Wahoofive (talk) 18:06, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Early Music Dates Citation Needed

I just noticed that this page and others defining music 'eras' need a ref. for the dates. This prompted me to look on Grove Music Online and in the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music (to find suitable refs.) - but both state that the term 'Early Music' is frequently considered to incorporates the Baroque Era(as I'm sure you all know). Grove says the following in fact: "A term once applied to music of the Baroque and earlier periods... now commonly used to denote any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed". So we need to change the date, of course there will be overlap between the common practice period, but that's how things work... This may also shed some light on the above query...? Matt.kaner 03:28, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

It really IS a pain to define, especially as when different people discuss it, as they often mean different things. For example, I was acutally surprised when I discovered that the definition included baroque, as I had generally interpreted from fans talking about it, that it referred mainly to the renaissance era and before, when instrumental forms were either highly under-developed, or just nowhere near dominant as they became in the baorque. If it does turn out to be difficult to get a single definition pinned down, we'll have to make a section explaining the subtleties of the definition... Lethe 15:42, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

The page used to read ([1]): Early music is a term used to describe pre-Classical Western music, from the earliest written music (ca. 1000 A.D.) to 1500 at the earliest (Judd, 1998, p.4) and the end of the Baroque era in about 1750 at the latest. For information on early music, see the following articles:

• Medieval music (roughly 1000-1450)
• Renaissance music (roughly 1450-1600)
• Baroque music (roughly 1600-1750)

Hyacinth (talk) 08:33, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Citation style

[2] as opposed to [3]. Hyacinth (talk) 08:30, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

You are quite right, the citation style was long in place before I added the requests for page numbers. I stand corrected.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:15, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Citation "needed"

There is NO possible way to give a citation on somethings. For example, on the fact that until a certain period music did NOT follow certain rules in writing, as is portrayed in this article. In order to properly provide a citation for that the author would have to show all works of music referred to which DID NOT follow those rules, which is quite impossible and useless... therefore I think the "citation needed" thing should be removed... I wanted to myself but I'd rather bring the subject up for discussion here first. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.253.35.112 (talk) 23:53, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

All that is needed is a reliable source that states the same.--SabreBD (talk) 00:01, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Absolutely correct. The really difficult thing is not finding one author who will stick his neck out and state that (for example) suspensions were never resolved upward before 11:53 AM on 13 April 1477, and whether or not this is true does not matter, since "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth". What is nearly impossible to establish is weasel language such as saying "most authorities agree" on such a thing—that really would require an impossible amount of documentation, unless you got very, very lucky! If absolutely no authority can be found to support claims like this, they should be removed, or modified to conform to a source that can be found.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:39, 26 December 2010 (UTC)