November - December 2024
By Brian Wise
“In the list of classical music niches least likely to embrace crossover—or some- thing akin to it—the early-music movement has always ranked near the very top. During its rise, the movement’s goal was to perform music exactly as composers intended and in the style of their time. Original texts needed to be stringently observed, and gut strings and valveless horns had to be made in a certain way. Practitioners have favored names around terms like “Antiqua” and “Schola.”
But when Ruckus, a New York–based “continuo band,” plays a siciliano from a Bach Flute Sonata, its members add a funky bass line, heavy string slapping, and almost bluesy flute acrobatics. Similarly, when the string band ACRONYM presents a chaconne attributed to Biber, the keyboardist adds rippling melodic licks that appear to be drawn from a Coldplay song.
And though the young ensemble Twelfth Night is perhaps less freewheeling with its source material, it is known to add staging and lighting effects to its performances, which have included New York shows in a Meatpacking District loft, at the Brooklyn Army Terminal warehouse complex, and in the Moorish lobby of the United Palace Theater, a movie palace in Upper Manhattan.
Over the last 15 years, what has been called a third wave of historical performance practice (HPP) ensembles has emerged, bring ing a retooled set of priorities. Third wave advocates are not interested in the battles of the 1980s and ’90s, with their dogmatic claims to authenticity and chronological borders. Instead, they’re reclaiming some of the revolutionary spirit of the first wave (1960s and early ’70s) ensembles, bolstered by the omnivorous spirit of a digital generation.
“With the earlier generation of HPP per formers, there was a big focus on authenticity,” says Kivie Cahn-Lipman, a cellist and viola da gamba player who founded Acronym in 2012. “I think the younger generations of players acknowledged that, one, we can’t really know what people were doing [in pre-Classical eras], and two, we don’t care as much. It’s less about the sort of museum-piece aesthetic of trying to recreate something from 300 years ago.”
Acronym’s ten albums emerge as gatherings of curios and treasures from the dusty corners of a flea market, spanning the quirky “Alphabet Sonatas” of the Polish-born Johann Pezel to gems from the Düben family of composers who served the Royal Swedish Court in the 1700s.”
Read the full article HERE.