EXPLORING MUSIC1/27/2023 CARRYING ON A TRADITION St. George's Canzona & John Sothcott, Medieval Songs and Dances
David M. Greene
The MHS Review 384 VOL. 11, NO. 6 • 1987
I have noted many times in the past that we live in the Age of the Expert. In reality an expert is someone who has taken the trouble to learn something more about a given subject than most of us know, which usually turns out not to be much. (See your local mechanic, record-store clerk, or physician, for examples.) However, in the current shortage of prophets and holy men ( except on the tube), we have elevated the experts to a much higher plane: we, awestricken, look to them for the information we do not want to trouble ourselves to seek out and the thinking we don't want to strain our brains to do. So for several decades now the Experts have ladled out information (real, mis-, and dis-) and look at the mess they've got us into.
But few notice or question, and so the Experts thrive on their exorbitant incomes. (Take it from one who knows! I expect to spend eons in hell for accepting what my university gives me for my alleged expertise.) Thus encouraged, they are, I perceive, moving forward into a new era, which smacks of prophecy and might be called the Age of Theory. Having crammed their heads with bits and pieces of information (or stored them in their equally dependable computers) they are now increasingly telling us what they imagine It All Means.
Theory, of course, works best in the hard sciences, though every so often something like the recent supernova comes along to confound all their thinking. (No one, to my knowledge, has hazarded the idea that it heralds the Second Coming--but then I stay away from the TV on Sundays.) It seems to work least well in the social fields--psychology, sociology, education, economics--which almost certainly helps explain the mess noted above. Somewhere in between are the Fine Arts, where in our time creativity has been reduced to virtual impotence by insistence that artists load up on all the theories before they touch a pen to paper or a brush to canvas.
This sort of thing, however, found little application in the realm of practical musicmaking until the musicologists had raked up bits and pieces of information on early performance-practice. Soon this player or that group decided that he, she, or they might find it amusing and instructive to try to play olde musicke in the olde waie. (One of the early efforts was a Handel record by the Telemann Society, using such things as baroque reeds and natural horns, which resulted in the darndest cacophony you ever heard.) But once the novelty-seeking public was convinced that such efforts were legitimate and that if it was caught listening to olde musicke played otherwise than the Experts decreed it would be cast into outer darkness, the floodgates were opened, and every Expert could work out his own performance theory, no matter how outrageous.
By now we have progressed to demanding John Cage Played on Original Instruments, which is easy to achieve, since Cage isn't much interested in specific instruments or how they're played. But the farther back in time one goes, the greater the latitude for theory. John Sothcott, director of the St. George's Canzona, is a man who for 30 years has concerned himself with medieval and Renaissance music. He began in the 1950s with a group called Musica Reservata, whose founder, Michael Morrow, had, refreshingly, strong reservations about the possibilities of recapturing early. performance-style at all. However, on the theory that surviving music from the ancient past was essentially popular music, it was his whimsy to treat it in quasi-modern folk or pop style.
Sothcott has carried on that tradition, apparently to suggest that rock has always been with us, merely having gone underground in the dreary bourgeois centuries that preceded ours. And, with his artsy little collections ostensibly built around historical figures (e.g. Robin Hood, the Black Prince) and events, he seems to have exerted considerable appeal. Here he offers simply a smorgasbord of medieval songs and dances, most of them (troubadour ditties, estampies, Middle English things, and cantigas de Santa Maria) the stuff of innumerable such anthologies.
Review of Traditional Music from the Middle Ages Featuring
St. George's Canzona
John Sothcott, Director
Medieval Songs and Dances Pg 67
I have noted many times in the past that we live in the Age of the Expert. In reality an expert is someone who has taken the trouble to learn something more about a given subject than most of us know, which usually turns out not to be much. (See your local mechanic, record-store clerk, or physician, for examples.) However, in the current shortage of prophets and holy men ( except on the tube), we have elevated the experts to a much higher plane: we, awestricken, look to them for the information we do not want to trouble ourselves to seek out and the thinking we don't want to strain our brains to do. So for several decades now the Experts have ladled out information (real, mis-, and dis-) and look at the mess they've got us into.
But few notice or question, and so the Experts thrive on their exorbitant incomes. (Take it from one who knows! I expect to spend eons in hell for accepting what my university gives me for my alleged expertise.) Thus encouraged, they are, I perceive, moving forward into a new era, which smacks of prophecy and might be called the Age of Theory. Having crammed their heads with bits and pieces of information (or stored them in their equally dependable computers) they are now increasingly telling us what they imagine It All Means.
Theory, of course, works best in the hard sciences, though every so often something like the recent supernova comes along to confound all their thinking. (No one, to my knowledge, has hazarded the idea that it heralds the Second Coming--but then I stay away from the TV on Sundays.) It seems to work least well in the social fields--psychology, sociology, education, economics--which almost certainly helps explain the mess noted above. Somewhere in between are the Fine Arts, where in our time creativity has been reduced to virtual impotence by insistence that artists load up on all the theories before they touch a pen to paper or a brush to canvas.
This sort of thing, however, found little application in the realm of practical musicmaking until the musicologists had raked up bits and pieces of information on early performance-practice. Soon this player or that group decided that he, she, or they might find it amusing and instructive to try to play olde musicke in the olde waie. (One of the early efforts was a Handel record by the Telemann Society, using such things as baroque reeds and natural horns, which resulted in the darndest cacophony you ever heard.) But once the novelty-seeking public was convinced that such efforts were legitimate and that if it was caught listening to olde musicke played otherwise than the Experts decreed it would be cast into outer darkness, the floodgates were opened, and every Expert could work out his own performance theory, no matter how outrageous.
By now we have progressed to demanding John Cage Played on Original Instruments, which is easy to achieve, since Cage isn't much interested in specific instruments or how they're played. But the farther back in time one goes, the greater the latitude for theory. John Sothcott, director of the St. George's Canzona, is a man who for 30 years has concerned himself with medieval and Renaissance music. He began in the 1950s with a group called Musica Reservata, whose founder, Michael Morrow, had, refreshingly, strong reservations about the possibilities of recapturing early. performance-style at all. However, on the theory that surviving music from the ancient past was essentially popular music, it was his whimsy to treat it in quasi-modern folk or pop style.
Sothcott has carried on that tradition, apparently to suggest that rock has always been with us, merely having gone underground in the dreary bourgeois centuries that preceded ours. And, with his artsy little collections ostensibly built around historical figures (e.g. Robin Hood, the Black Prince) and events, he seems to have exerted considerable appeal. Here he offers simply a smorgasbord of medieval songs and dances, most of them (troubadour ditties, estampies, Middle English things, and cantigas de Santa Maria) the stuff of innumerable such anthologies.
Review of Traditional Music from the Middle Ages Featuring
St. George's Canzona
John Sothcott, Director
Medieval Songs and Dances Pg 67