intro
MUSIC
Holly Roberts and Marc Vanscheeuwijck are two key artists in the conference.
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Reimagining “Early Music” Is there anything new to discover about very old music? UO faculty members, graduate students, and the 900 attendees of a recent campus conference think so.
t’s noon on a weekday in April, 2004 to the School of Music and Dance musicology BY BONNIE HENDERSON and though it’s called a lunchbox faculty and its early music program. It’s one of the concert, no one is eating. The piece being played is a oldest buildings on campus, at the geographical center, its walls too reconstruction of a 15th-century chant, performed thin to compartmentalize or even contain the music made within: the by a soprano and a baritone, and while the harmoperfect venue, according to UO associate professor of musicology Marc nies aren’t unfamiliar, to the modern ear the Latin Vanscheeuwijck. Musicology and early music are small programs at UO, text seems off: Latin-ish somehow, its consonants barely known beyond the music school and the robust community of crunchier, German-inflected. Which, it turns out, is early music enthusiasts in Eugene. But among practitioners of historical the point. This recital—of chants originally sung in a performance practice around the world, it’s a rising star. Salzburg monastery in 1492—was part of the UO’s first Musicology, early music, musicking, historically informed performance: Musicking Conference, a week of panel discussions, the concepts overlap and sometimes collide, and all are in flux. Musicology coaching sessions, and performances open to campus refers to the scholarly research of music—the old, the new, and the paths and community alike, all free of charge. Like all the performances at the that led from one to the other. Early music used to be code for Western conference, it was “historically informed”—not merely an expression of European music of the baroque era, but as Vanscheeuwijck—himself a the performers’ virtuosic vocal practice, but the result of their painstak- baroque cellist—points out, the term is becoming increasingly “absurd” as ing research into when and where the music was composed, sung, and it has stretched to include music of the Renaissance and Middle Ages and heard, by whom and in what context. even, now, music of the 19th-century Romantic era. The focus of interest The recital took place not in a concert hall, nor even a church. It was a at the Collier House isn’t on music of a particular period in the past but living room—the main-floor salon of the 1886 Collier House, home since rather on historically informed performance, or historical performance
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O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY
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SUMMER 2016
PHOTOGRAPH BY KELLY JAMES