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Elizabeth Kenny, Beyond the Golden Age, Early Music, Volume 36, Issue 2, May 2008, Pages 179–180, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/can050
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In April 2007 Southampton University hosted a one-day conference in association with the Royal Musical Association and the Music & Letters Trust, called ‘Beyond the Golden Age: lutes, lute song and the lure of opera in 17th century England’. I organized it along with Jeanice Brooks to mark the mid-point of a research project on which we had been collaborating since October 2005 (one of several Southampton-based Fellowships in Creative and Performing Arts funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), to share ideas with academic specialists in 17th-century English vocal repertory and to demonstrate some of the new approaches to performance with which we had been experimenting. Two of the papers in this issue of Early Music were written for the conference.
What were English musicians doing in the middle of the 17th century—keeping up with French and Italian technical-technological developments or ignoring them? Writing music for late Shakespearean plays and Jacobean masques, to be sure; but what style(s) of performance did they anticipate? Which instruments, improvisational tools and collaborative working methods did they have available? My own article takes English lute song manuscript sources as its starting point and investigates the possible significance of readings not encountered in the printed versions much more familiar today (notated ornamentation and heavily revised accompaniments, for instance). In theatrical contexts there seems to have been a demand for performances far removed from the restrained ‘domestic’ ideal usually imputed to Golden Age composers. When poets, composers and performers worked together to create stage music their relationship may not have been as harmonious as Golden Age mythology encourages us to believe. In their article Andrew Pinnock and Bruce Wood pursue this theme through to the end of the century, looking at early English opera librettos and considering their fitness (or otherwise) for musical purpose.
