The Long 17th Century: A Cornucopia of Early Keyboard Music
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Academy of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- RAM006
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Duke's Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first performance
- February
- Year of first performance
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This is a substantial volume of original work.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This collection offers the widest range of seventeenth-century keyboard music ever essayed on the piano in a recording (including many first recordings on the piano).
The project advocates exploring the totality of early keyboard music on the piano through exploiting the synergy between curating a highly varied programme of works from the ‘long 17th century’ and a vision for the entire set as a series of highly individualised responses to a wide range of technical and expressive challenges. The image of variety - of pianism, rhetorical strategies, scale, stylistic register, mood, feeling and characterisation - drove repertoire choices and performance practices in equal measure to the repertoire choices suggesting their own particular challenges.
Adapting the works to the performer’s broader aesthetic and pianistic values becomes a more vital way to open up fresh expressive vistas and sound palettes for this music than simply taking the cue from historical instruments and practices and transferring them imperfectly to the modern piano.
This often means exploiting the possibilities of the modern instrument (in terms of textures, gestures, tempi, buoyancy of rhythm, accentuation, voicing) in ways that are not viable on the original keyboard instruments, but which may be possible on non-keyboard instruments, or even be latent elements in the scores now brought to the fore – or perhaps simply be altogether anachronistic but communicative ‘discoveries’.
The burden of proof rests on the performer’s own aesthetic sensibility and musical intelligence rather than verifiable historical authority. As such, this project provides a model for thinking of the music of the 17th century as a creative playing field in itself for the modern pianist, rather than an early music field from which the occasional work is included for curiosity value.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
