Connecting Research and Practice: Cataloguing, Curating, and Contextualizing Performances of Early Music, 1915-1960

Although it is acknowledged that important performances of medieval and Renaissance music took place throughout Europe during the early twentieth century, these concerts have attracted relatively little attention from scholars. Existing historiographies have highlighted the knowledge transfer that took place through informal performances in academic seminars that enabled students and professors alike to acquaint themselves with unfamiliar repertoires. But this project argues that public performances also played an important role in the evolution of music-historical narratives, the formation of an early music canon centered around music by a group of musicians from modern-day Belgium and France, and the development of music and our discipline. To better understand the emergence of the early music performance tradition, this project will systematically collect and curate all of this information in a way that moves beyond narrative descriptions of a few individual concerts. It will track programs of medieval and Renaissance music performed between 1915 and 1960 in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Data collected through directed archival research will be catalogued and curated in an online database and then carefully analyzed. In doing so, we can better understand the genesis of the modern early music movement and the ways in which early scholars and performers continue to influence the field today.

Keywords:Renaissance, musicology

Disciplines:Musicology and ethnomusicology