Imagine a trumpet.
A length of shiny metal, curled back on itself into an oblong whorl, ending in a flared bell. A mouthpiece. Some round, buttonlike keys on top. We all know what a trumpet is. Duh.
But that trumpet, the one you played in middle school band or see onstage at Benaroya Hall, has only existed for roughly 200 years, a marvel of Industrial Revolution-era machinery.
Before that, musical instruments were always evolving to reflect the technological innovations and artistic ambitions of their day, as was music itself. And, of course, it still is.
That’s why, far from being a dusty relic, early music is a place of risk and exploration — something the artists of Seattle’s vibrant early music scene have always known. Classical music, which some might regard as rigid and fixed, becomes seen as far more malleable. By learning about art and artists of the musical past, we can expand our understanding of music’s present and future. At the same time, today’s early music community is also broadening its traditional boundaries and definitions, which only enriches the conversation further.
Expanding borders
Case in point: From Oct. 9-13, longtime local presenting organization Early Music Seattle launches a new model for its Beyond Baroque festival featuring a wide variety of local and international musicians and thoughtful conversations, aimed at broadening a narrow understanding of what “early music” even is.
There’s no single definition of “early music,” though since the American early-music movement ignited in the 1970s, it’s hewed largely to a European tradition, from the murky Medieval period through the explosive Renaissance and into the late Baroque era of the 18th century, epitomized by composers like Bach and Handel.
But music existed long before people wrote it down. Flutes made of mammoth ivory and vulture bones, dating back some 40,000 years, have turned up in what is now southwest Germany; early trumpets were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb.
For August Denhard, a lute player and the longtime artistic director of Early Music Seattle, early music is “any ancient music tradition that is valued and revered by a community.”
Since stumbling into the lute to get out of a piano requirement in college (he was a tuba major at the prestigious Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in the ’80s), Denhard has been exploring early stringed instruments. His personal understanding of early music blossomed after a teaching gig in Mexico in 2014.
“When I came back I realized that I had been sort of blind to all of the artistic connections that we could make with artists everywhere, and also the interrelatedness of different music genres,” he said.
He held up a round-bodied lute from the ancient Arab world, called an oud, “as it would have appeared around 1100, played with a bone plectrum [guitar pick].” Next came a baroque guitar, more curved in shape and decorated with the Seal of Solomon, later known as the Star of David. Then another guitar, slightly smaller than a modern guitar but otherwise, he said, essentially the same instrument that Taylor Swift plays today.
“I would love for music to be seen in those terms,” he said. “Where we see the whole evolution and movement of humans. A culture gets passed through trade and conquest, primarily, so if you tell the stories of the instruments and how they evolved and ended up in different places, you’re also telling the stories of history.”
That’s why, in collaboration with new Executive Director Ludovica Punzi, Denhard and Early Music Seattle are rethinking their programming, and their 2024 festivals feature artists such as eminent Spanish early musician Jordi Savall; Costa Rican violinist Guillermo Salas Suarez playing with local harpsichordist and scholar Byron Schenkman; and groups including Duo Takinai, whose name blends Chinese and Quechua words, and Trío Guadalevín, which explores the musical dialogue between Indigenous, European and African cultures.
“It’s exciting for me that [early music] is expanding,” said baroque violinist Rachell Ellen Wong, co-founder of Twelfth Night, a group that uses period instruments and is currently ensemble-in-residence at Early Music Seattle. “It’s not just a white-owned thing anymore.”
“Spirit of inquiry”
For Eric Mentzel, artistic director of Seattle’s Medieval Women’s Choir, early music is really about “the spirit of inquiry, not just accepting that we do this music the way we do it, and that’s the end of the story,” he said.
Consider, he said, even our notions of musical accuracy — an easy thing to take as a given: Playing the notes correctly is correct. But without the strict right-and-wrong of modern musical notation, there is no perfection, only expression. That’s a pretty mind-blowing idea, if you let it be.
The earliest notated music in the Western tradition dates back to about the ninth century, said Mentzel, who is also a vocalist and a professor of voice, medieval studies and music at the University of Oregon. For centuries before that, only the text for Gregorian chant and liturgical music was written down; over time, the writers started to make small markings, aides-mémoire, to remind them what happened musically on certain words. These markings, called neumes, are the predecessors of modern musical notation.
Along with the gradual evolution of written music, the evolution of instruments over time also helps illustrate how music has never been rigid.
To create its sound world, the Medieval Women’s Choir is often accompanied by medieval harp, vielle (a medieval fiddle) and period percussion like bells, clappers and various hand drums (a la our modern tambourine).
Early stringed instruments like the vielle used gut strings, made of fibers of animal intestines, rather than the steel strings used today. Gut strings, said Wong, are very personal, almost like a human voice.
“I love both, but modern strings are like a Ferrari and gut strings are like riding a horse,” said the New York-based Wong, who grew up in Lynnwood, earned a graduate degree in historical performance from The Juilliard School and, with keyboard player David Belkovski, founded musical ensemble Twelfth Night. “With gut strings you have to really feel the personality of them. They’re all different and need different things.”
The same is true for brass instruments, though they came later.
“It took people up until around the 1400s to develop the technology of bending a tube,” said local musician Kris Kwapis, a baroque trumpet player and professor at the elite Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
A baroque trumpet is curled, like a modern trumpet, but unlike a modern trumpet it has no valves (those buttonlike keys on top), which, in essence, change the length of the tube through which air is passing, thanks to piston technology of the Industrial Revolution.
All these early instruments were meant to be played in homes or the soaring acoustics of religious buildings, not massive modern concert halls. That context matters, because early music isn’t just about understanding notes and instruments of the past — it’s also about understanding the people who made this music and the world that they lived in. To try and play a baroque trumpet just like a modern trumpet is to miss the point.
“You’re missing the opportunity of actually learning the performance practice aspect, which is rooted in thinking of music as speech,” Kwapis said. (Performance practice is the study of how music would have been performed in its composer’s day.) “Old and new don’t have to sound so different, in that we’re all humans expressing things, but if we think about life in our modern world, we’re influenced by the sounds of machines — the disembodied voices that are on our telephones, our TV screens and iPads. [Baroque music] is about trying to imagine a sound that comes out of that [historical] world, as opposed to our modern world.”
For that reason, Wong thinks every musician should learn about historical performance practice. “[Music] is so personal to each country and to each time period,” she said, and historical knowledge can expand musical perspectives in a powerful way.
For Twelfth Night’s Wong, Baroque music isn’t just about the instruments or even the sound world, it’s also about us, the viewers.
“While we’re doing a historical performance, you are a historical audience,” she said. “And that doesn’t mean sitting in your seat quietly and trying not to cough. [Historical audiences] were making comments, they were showing if they liked something — and they were showing if they didn’t like something.”
Imagine classical music. How might this spirit of inquiry change the way you feel about it? If we remember how malleable music has long been, perhaps we can increase our own malleability into the future, whether that means embracing unfamiliar sound worlds or whetting our appetites for the work of new composers who are breaking the so-called rules. Because the rules are what we make them, and they can be anything.