Early music is generally understood as comprising all music from the earliest times up to the Renaissance

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

. However, today this term has come to include "any music for which a historically appropriate style of performance must be reconstructed on the basis of surviving scores, treatises, instruments and other contemporary evidence."

Performance practice

According to Margaret Bent, "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness. Accidentals

Accidental (music)

In music, an accidental is a note whose pitch is not a member of a scale or mode indicated by the most recently applied key signature. In musical notation, the symbols used to mark such notes, sharps , flats , and naturals , may also be called accidentals...

 … may or may not have been notated, but what modern notation requires would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint

Counterpoint

In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...

".

See also

• Early Music Revival
  Early Music Revival
  See Early music and Historically informed performance for a more detailed explanation of this topic.The general discussion of how to perform music from ancient or earlier times did not become an important subject of interest until the 19th century, when Europeans began looking to ancient culture...
  
  
• Ancient music
  Ancient music
  Ancient music is music that developed in literate cultures, replacing prehistoric music.Ancient music refers to the various musical systems that were developed across various geographical regions such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India, China, Greece and Rome. Ancient music is designated by the...
  
  
• List of early music ensembles
• Early music festivals
  Early music festivals
  Early music festivals is a generic term for musical festivals focused on music before Beethoven, or including Historically informed performance of later works...
  
  
• History of music
  History of music
  Music is found in every known culture, past and present, varying wildly between times and places. Around 50,000 years ago, early modern humans began to disperse from Africa, reaching all the habitable continents...
  
  
• Neo-medieval music
  Neo-Medieval music
  Neo-Medieval music is a term used to describe a variety of styles within modern popular music. A common characteristic of these styles is that they contain elements of Medieval music and early music in general...
  
  

Further reading

• Davidson, Audrey Ekdahl. 2008. Aspects of Early Music and Performance. New York: AMS Press. ISBN 9780404646011.
• Donington, Robert. 1989. The Interpretation of Early Music, new revised edition. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0571150403.
• Epp, Maureen, and Brian E. Power (eds.). 2009. The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music: Essays in Honour of Timothy J. Mcgee. Farnham, Surrey (UK); Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ISBN 9780754654834.
• Haskell, Harry. 1988. The Early Music Revival: A History. London and New York: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0500014493.
• Haynes, Bruce. 2007. The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195189872.
• Judd, Cristle Collins. 1998. "Introduction: Analyzing Early Music". In Tonal Structures in Early Music, edited by Cristle Collins Judd, 3–13. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1998; Criticism and Analysis of Early Music 1. New York: Garland Publishing. ISBN 0-8153-2388-3.
• Kelly, Thomas Forrest. 2011. Early Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199730766.
• Roche, Jerome, and Elizabeth Roche. 1981. A Dictionary of Early Music: From the Troubadours to Monteverdi. London: Faber Music in association with Faber & Faber; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 057110035X (UK, cloth); ISBN 0571100368 (UK, pbk); ISBN 0195202554 (US, cloth).
• Sherman, Bernard. 1997. Inside Early Music: Conversations with Performers. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195097084.
• Stevens, Denis. 1997. Early Music, revised edition. Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides. London: Kahn & Averill. ISBN 1871082625. First published as Musicology (London: Macdonald & Co. Ltd, 1980).

External links

• Early Music FAQ
  • What is Early Music?
• Ancient Tunes, Young Ears: Teaching Early Music to Kids
• Renaissance Workshop Company the company which has saved many rare and some relatively unknown instruments from extinction.
• Early MusiChicago - Early Music in Chicago and Beyond, with many links and resources of general interest
• The Waits Website (designed to accumulate and disseminate historical information on Waits, and to advertise the growing number of revival bands, as well as their equivalents throughout Europe).
• Innsbruck Festival of Early Music
• Early Music Radio - Celebrating Early Music and Early Music Performance