Early Music: A Personal Journey and Reflections on the NEMA Legacy

Early Music: A Personal Journey and Reflections on NEMA

When asked to discuss my career in early music and share thoughts on the movement—past, present, and future—I felt it was also important to reflect on the National Early Music Association (NEMA) at this somewhat critical point in its existence. These two subjects intertwine, as will become clear while we meander along. And it will meander because, like many people, I have moved in and out of early music—medieval one day and the Strand Corner House the next (I played in the gypsy band there a couple of times; one of the great advantages of being a drummer is that you play everything and anything).

I started in early music back around 1950. It is difficult to remember what came first. Was it the ancestor of my own instrument (I was a horn player as a second study to conducting), feeling that what Mozart and Beethoven were writing for was not this thing I was playing? Or was it when conducting Vivaldi and Bach with all those slurs and hairpins? The conservatories in those days had no classes in editing or anything like that; none of the staff ever mentioned Urtext or such concepts—you played what was on the paper. They did invite Fritz Rothschild to come and talk about The Lost Tradition in Music, and it remained a standing joke for weeks thereafter.

I found a handhorn in a music shop in Wisbech when I was touring during the 1951 Festival of Britain. Thanks to Eric Halfpenny, this led to an introduction to Morley-Pegge. I shall never forget sitting in his bedroom in his flat in Hall Road while he played a written C major scale, from middle C up, with not the slightest difference of tone or volume between the open and stopped notes. Eric also talked me into joining the Galpin Society, where I eventually followed him as Honorary Secretary from the mid-60s.

Conducting was not far behind. I used a string orchestra because it was cheaper, and we divided the programmes between ancient and modern (there is not much for strings in between!), starting with Vivaldi, Handel, or whatever else from that period, and often finishing with a first performance as one way of attracting critics and reviews. People wanted to know why the hell I was wasting money putting a harpsichord—which nobody ever heard—on the platform, and paying a continuo player.

Of course we learned as we went along. I remember saying to Walter Emery after a concert that included a Vivaldi concerto with a particularly beautiful sequence of chords and nothing else for a slow movement that it had sounded like an accompaniment. "Yes," he said. "What to?" I asked. "You write it," he replied. People in those days had not acquired the idea of improvising such things on the spot; they did not even know which way up to play a trill, and I had long arguments with Norman Del Mar, my conducting teacher, about the trills in the slow movement of Brandenburg 6. I also remember writing out a slow movement for Brandenburg 4, following Tovey's advice, but with a short movement from a violin sonata that ends with the right chords.

We played on modern instruments at that time because there was no alternative, though around the time I stopped putting on my own concerts (because I started to have children and ran out of money), Bob Dart and Sid Humphreys began to use Dolmetsch bows on modern fiddles as a tolerable compromise—something Robert Donington recommended as a first step. At least we were cleaning up the parts. No Tippex in those days, but one could get white ink and write over all the Breitkopf & Härtel and Ricordi slurs, bowings, and hairpins, or one could scrape them out with a sharp knife—this took hours and hours, and one could only do it if one bought the parts. It was not something that Goodwin & Tabb liked on hire parts.

But this was earlyish, rather than early. We did try: we altered note values, we graced cadences, we used continuo (Julian Bream once played lute continuo for the concertino while Jane Clark—who taught me so much in those days—played harpsichord continuo for the ripieno on the Fenton House single-manual Shudi; one could hire that for a concert in those days), and we did our best.

I became convinced—and I am still sure of this—that when a German or English composer took the trouble to title a movement in French, he expected it to be played in French. A minuet might be played straight, a minuetto ornamented in Italian style, but a menuet—and many other French pieces—should be played in French style.

It was through the Galpin Society that I really got enmeshed, and because the Galpin members played their instruments, I came to realise that it was the sound of the music that came first. After all, music is sound (that is about the only definition of music on which everyone can agree), and if you are trying to perform it the first thing to do is try to get the sound right. If the sound is right, the music may be right—if the sound is wrong, the music cannot be right. There is plenty of modern music nowadays where the sound is all that matters. I remember one concert for brass and percussion where, as we came off the platform, one trumpeter said to the other, "That was a B♭ part, wasn't it?" and his mate said, "Was it? I was playing in C." But the composer was happy because the sound was right, and neither he nor the conductor had even noticed, either then or at rehearsal, that one part was a tone out all the way. Still, that was not early music. One advantage of first performances was that you could get away with murder—nobody knew the difference.

It was at a Galpin meeting that Michael Morrow said, "Can I give you a leaflet for this concert by our new medieval ensemble?" I asked him, "Who's your percussion player?" and I played that concert in Fenton House on a pair of jazz tom-toms for nakers, a side drum for tabor, a modern tambourine, and so forth. It did not seem right. There was John Sothcott on recorder, Michael on lute, Daphne Webb on viol, I cannot remember what John Beckett played other than harpsichord, and me on the modern drums.

So I decided to investigate. I looked at medieval manuscripts and carvings (advertisement: have you all seen Gwen's and my recent book, Minstrels and Angels?), and then made things that looked like what the angels played. Of course no medieval drums survive, so one could only hope that they might sound something like the originals, but drummers get pretty experienced at making odd bits of kit (Jimmy Blades made me a tubular bell for my first pantomime—you cannot play Cinderella without a bell), and one gets to know how an instrument is likely to work and what it will sound like when you see it. I was part of Musica Reservata from then on. We had pretty staid ideas in modern terms, but they worked.

We believed—and I still believe—that dance music, as most of the surviving instrumental music is, should be played as dance music, and we believed that dancers were not so different in the Middle Ages from what they were at the end of the 1950s. What was needed was strict tempo, as Victor Silvester proved, and solid rhythms. It was a belief for which there is no evidence save for the experience of a musician who has played for dancers (not enough of our modern early music players have ever sat in a dance band), but it is a belief confirmed to the hilt by Thoinot Arbeau in 1588. Can one project his statements back two or three hundred years to the Middle Ages? It is up to each of us to decide, but I know what I believe. After all, you can still hear his unvarying, repetitive, rock-steady beat in any Viennese waltz and in any Latin American dance band. If you could hear dance band drummers playing his rhythms in 1888 and 1988, why not in 1488, 1388, and 1288? Dancers still need to know which is the first beat of the bar, hence Strauss's unvarying um-cha-cha, um-cha-cha and Arbeau's dun-ta-ta-ta-ta dun-ta-ta-ta-ta—it is just two different ways of doing the same job. The trouble is that it does not sound flashy and with-it, and that is what sells today.

When Musica Reservata hit the major concert halls, it made quite a stir. Up to then, medieval music had been a bit quiet; most performers had started in madrigals and continued that way with a dash of country tea-rooms. Our very direct approach was a bit different. I suppose not many remember us now—our last concerts were over twenty years ago—but our drive and hard rhythms, often hard tone, were then very new. Michael Morrow had very firm ideas and he took what little evidence there is very seriously. We know what many of the instruments sounded like, so that is the sound we made, both instrumentally and vocally. We can normally see not more than one or two players in the pictures and carvings (leaving aside the psalm illustrations), so we kept away from the musical toyshop and the medieval big band. We might use different instruments in two different pieces, but we never swapped instruments around from verse to verse like confetti, as some bands do today.

What I have told you so far about sums up my career as an early music performer. Of course, Reservata was not the only early music group I played with—I was playing early timpani too—and I was not only involved in early music; I have played in orchestras of all sorts. I can even tell my grandchildren that I was the first person to play under a conductor in the Festival Hall. Each of the schools of music played a concert as part of the series of acoustic tests. The Guildhall did the first one. In those days every concert began with the Queen (the King then), and who rolls her up? The side drummer—me. Later I was Beecham's number one spare, the first they called in for an extra. He was a bit different from the rest.

But one thing led to another. I have never believed in keeping secrets from other players, so I published what I had learned and guessed about early percussion, initially in the Galpin Journal. That started other players, pre-eminently Paul Williamson, who came to me to ask why his big tabor did not sound like mine. He went on to make all sorts of medieval percussion far better than I did, and I used his instruments rather than my own except for the big tabor (which he never made commercially) and the tambourine (because I preferred the sound of my hammer-beaten jingles to those of his cast ones, which I thought were too heavy and too bell-like).

A few years later, John Thomson asked Jimmy Blades and me to write a couple of books on early percussion; we had already done a joint article for him in the second issue of Early Music, and before that I had written the medieval chapter for Jimmy for his big book and my own World of Medieval and Renaissance Musical Instruments. Jimmy's and mine were number 2 and number 3 in the OUP Early Music Series—Howard Brown's Embellishing was number 1—and they all came out together in 1976, the year after FoMRHI began. FoMRHI had been Eph Segerman's idea, but he talked me into being the dogsbody for it. It was the following year that Howard chaired that big conference on "The Future of Early Music in Britain," which had been convened by Tony Rooley.

It was that conference which led to the foundation of NEMA. It was another of John Thomson's ideas, was it not—Early Music, NEMA, the Forums; we owe him a lot. Once NEMA began, it took over Chris Monk's and Carl Willetts's Register of Early Music, which became our Yearbook. With all due deference to all those present who have written articles in our other publications, that is certainly NEMA's most important production, and it is the one thing that must continue, whatever we may decide is going to happen to NEMA today. We must hope, too, that if someone else is going to run it, whoever takes it over is not going to go too commercial on it. It is not something we can do without, and it has always been affordable—free to members (and our subscription has never been one to break the bank) and cheap enough for non-members to buy if they do not have the sense to join us. It is also one of the things that links the Fora.

When I was planning this meander, I thought I would look back on NEMA's history as well as my own. I thought I remembered the days when it began—all those meetings John called at Ely House, discussions about what it would do, how it would do it, and all that, a constitution being argued back and forth, I seem to remember drafted by Bruno Turner. One idea that never really worked was that of exchange membership with the other organisations. I think this was mainly because none of us got round to swapping information about what we were doing and what was going on, as we should have done. But it did mean, in theory, that NEMA could speak for us all in the corridors of power if it ever got there. All the same, it was one reason that NEMA got off to such a slow start as far as the number of individual members was concerned. We all belonged to something else already—Lute Society, Galpin, FoMRHI, Recorder, Viola da Gamba, and so on—and did we need to belong to NEMA too? Especially if our other society itself belonged to NEMA.

I thought I remembered all that, but then I thought of looking in the 25-year Index of Early Music and there was Cliff Bartlett's account of our first AGM in December with a reference back to our first conference in July of that year, on "Early Music and the Critic," at which, according to Cliff, not many musicians and even fewer critics turned up. So I looked back earlier in Early Music, and found the account of our inaugural meeting, on 31 October 1981, "as a direct result of the famed 1977 conference on 'The Future of Early Music in Britain.'" So I looked up John Thomson's report of that conference, which had been organised by Francesca McManus, who was to become our first Treasurer, Administrator, and mainstay once NEMA got going. Looking it through, it is notable how the emphasis in 1977 was already divided between the practical and the educational—two aspects which have always been our prime concerns.

In the report of our inauguration, John said we "will integrate the needs, interests and activities both of individuals (professional and amateur), and of existing societies, institutions, colleges, music departments, etc. It is an organizational experiment with immediate practical aims. These include: the creation and expansion of educational activities at every level from primary schools to universities and the lobbying of national organizations for their funding; the dissemination of information on the achievements of early music throughout Great Britain; the compilation of a national registry and directory embracing all aspects of early music; the lobbying of the press to encourage greater coverage and greater discrimination in the space allotted to early music; and the representation of early music in Britain internationally, to forge European and overseas links."

Much of that NEMA has indeed achieved, especially in education, with early music thriving in every university music department and every conservatory, though less successfully, I suspect, at the school level. We have all heard of schools where some heroic soul has gathered instruments and music together, got children enthusiastic about early music, produced some really exciting concerts, and then heard governors, even head teachers, say, "Well, we've done early music; what shall we do next year?" Least successful was the lobbying for funding, of course, for unless you are Covent Garden you will never succeed in getting real money in this country (and they only get a tithe of their needs). The compilation of a register, as I have already said, was and remains one of the major achievements. Lobbying the press and the dissemination of our achievements has been successful up to a point, but there are still many who do not take us seriously and who do not really understand the difference that the early music approach makes, even to quite late music. This is partly our own fault; when enough of us get up and say that authenticity is something that can never be achieved, the reaction is "Why bother to try then?" Our own members have done us a good deal of damage over the years! European and international links have certainly been forged—some of our ensembles perform more abroad than they do here, and many of our individual performers, editors, and directors are more respected abroad than here, at least as far as the general public and the media are concerned.

The publications—NEMA's own journals—carried useful articles and information, but they have never really settled down, not even to a coherent and continuing title, partly because too many of us were trying to find time to write for our other journals and newsletters, and for John's own Early Music and the Early Music series of books which he persuaded OUP to publish and encouraged us to write, and partly because many of us were not really sure just which gap NEMA was trying to fill in this way. The books that John inspired through Early Music and NEMA perhaps were more important and achieved more, though some were pretty controversial—itself a good thing. John and NEMA, between them, achieved a hell of a lot, one way or the other. I do not need to tell you the details because you were there, but we do need to recognise the devotion that many people put into it, quietly plugging along (though that was never a very appropriate description of Margot Leigh-Milner, in whose memory I have the honour to speak today) and keeping it going, despite lack of recognition.

Let us look back at John's report of that first preliminary conference back in 1977, in the Waterloo Room at the Royal Festival Hall. Let us see just how much of that conference has borne fruit, how many of its aims NEMA has achieved, as it was set up to do.

Frankly, it makes pretty depressing reading. Two papers—Cliff Bartlett's and mine—on libraries of music and instruments have produced no result at all (and mine was not just my idea—I was asked to speak on that subject), and I suspect, though it is not my field so I do not know for sure, that Peter Holman's on editing and the need for being paid for it has not had any better success. Richard Phillips's paper had better luck than some. The York Early Music Week still exists, but although his idea of an Early Music Network did get off the ground, where is it now? Of the papers on performing, the answer is pretty mixed. Yes, we have achieved quite a lot of what Chris Hogwood and Robert Donington spoke for, but to my mind a good deal less on the medieval and renaissance—certainly a lot less than Howard Brown wanted. I doubt whether Andrew Parrott, despite far greater musical achievements, is any better off on rehearsal time than he was then.

Could NEMA have done more to change things? Maybe. Certainly we have tried, though one problem is that we often hamstring ourselves. The fact that Peter set out the extent to which he is subsidising early music performances by doing all the preliminary editing unpaid has not stopped him from doing it. Nor does the fact that we are all often prepared to rehearse for nothing help in this. One suspects that an official attitude may well be, "If they are mug enough to do it, why should we waste our resources?" And of course we are all mug enough because if we were not, the performances would not happen.

Our trouble is that the people involved in early music are there because they want to be—because they want to perform the music. Mugs the lot of us.

Has NEMA done enough, that it might be time to stop? I am not sure. Certainly the movement has grown immeasurably since those early days. The question we now face is not whether early music matters—it clearly does—but whether NEMA remains the best structure for supporting it. Many of the original goals have been accomplished; institutions now teach historically informed performance as a matter of course, and the general public is far more aware of early music than it was in 1977. Yet challenges remain: funding is scarce, school-level education is patchy, and the press still does not always take us seriously. Perhaps what NEMA needs is not a winding down but a reinvention—a focus on new priorities that suit the present landscape, such as digital resources, advocacy for institutional support, and stronger connections with amateurs and young players. The conversation about its future is one we owe to the founders' legacy.

The trouble then was that we were compromising — doing our best, as I said earlier, with modern instruments. A decade later, in Musica Reservata, we were still compromising: playing at modern pitch so that we could bring in other players when needed, and using pea-shooter trombones (with two or three inches chopped off the bell to make them into sackbuts), pseudo-renaissance recorders from Bärenreiter — I remember going in there to choose them while on tour in Kassel; they were among the first on the market and the best available at the time. Daphne’s wonderful tenor rebec was actually a Sumatran gambus that Dietrich Kessler fitted with a fingerboard and a wooden belly to replace the original skin one. Don Smithers, who could play like an angel, used a cornett with a trumpet mouthpiece (that was before the NEMA Conference at which he insisted on using the proper acorn-cup). David Munrow, while still playing with us, lipped his shawm reed so that it sounded like a dyspeptic cor anglais. Jim Tyler turned an english guittar into a cittern, and, as I’ve already mentioned, my percussion was invented from whole cloth.

Now what makes me worry about the possibility of NEMA stopping is that — forty years later — we are still making compromises. Certainly things have changed: we are all using early instruments now, you can study any early instrument at any College, and all our young players have an awareness of it all. But do they really? Most of our early music ensembles are distinctly generic. R etrô — oh yes: “early is early,” but don’t ask “how early,” unless you don’t mind fairly sharp answers. And I wouldn’t, if I were you, ask if the trumpeters are using real natural trumpets instead of those things with holes like a colander. Look around the platform at any of our early music bands in concert; as you would expect, many faces will be familiar. Fair enough — the very best players get the best work; London’s freelance world has always worked that way. But what bothers me is seeing the exact same instruments in their hands whether the program is Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. And what also worries me is the notion, gaining currency now, that our symphony orchestras can play the earlier parts of their repertoire in ‘an early music fashion’. True, any performance can benefit from removing all the slurs and hairpins from a Breitkopf set of parts, but it still doesn’t sound the same, and the instruments definitely don’t balance the same.

I’m sure many of you are bored hearing me repeat that music is sound, and if the sound — the noise it makes — is wrong, the music itself won’t be right either. Nevertheless, I’ll keep saying it, because it’s one thing that we can get right. We cannot replicate everything, but some things we can, and maybe we haven’t emphasised that enough over these years — my fault perhaps; I should have shouted louder and bored you more with that notion. If NEMA disappeared, that would be one fewer place to shout it. Earlier I mentioned “the early music approach, even in quite late music.” Well, I joined the Musicians’ Union over fifty years ago (I still have a gold card to prove it), and every single instrument in the British orchestra has changed its sound since then — as have many aspects of playing technique. Any music written before 1950 could profit from a real early music approach. By that I do not mean only Simon Rattle or Charles Mackerras telling a typical symphony orchestra how to play it (though that is a fine start). I mean using the proper instruments: not just a baritone for the serpent instead of a bass tuba (still a good start), but pea-shooter trombones, narrow-bore French trumpets, wooden flutes, perhaps French bassoons and horns although German ones entered several orchestras before the war; gut A strings with covered gut D and G instead of those appalling steel strings — maybe even gut E (Kreisler never put up with the whine of a steel E, and I cannot be the only person here who remembers hearing him play; I’m certainly not alone in recalling the arrival of Thomastik strings in the mid-1850s); skin timpani heads, and so forth. All right, there is one band doing this, but how many engagements do they actually get?

At least that band uses the right instruments — they play the music as it was performed in the old Queen’s Hall. How many other bands can honestly state they use the proper instruments? How many play a concert of music from 1780–1790 with no instrument made or reproduced later than 1789 and none earlier than roughly 1770? How many assemble a hodge-podge of German, French, and English instruments? How many of the fiddlers still support the weight with their chins instead of their thumbs — the way players used to — making position-shifts an entirely new challenge? How many brass players use their ordinary modern mouthpiece or some adaptation of it, altering the sound and preventing them from bending the pitch? How many clarinettists use a flat scrape on the reed, and place the reed on the upper lip? I could continue like this for a very long time.

That’s one reason Philip Bate gave his collection to Oxford, Why Geoffrey Rendall gave his (in effect) to Edinburgh, and why Edgar Hunt let his follow Philip’s to Oxford. Those collections were — in part — the origin of my paper at that London conference, although they have never produced the followers and emulators that we truly need. Those instruments could be played, could be borrowed, could be useful. Many of our most distinguished early music professionals first began when Tony Baines put an instrument into their hands and said, “Try that.” I of course followed his lead. I amassed the vast library of plans and measured drawings — in which Arnold Myers later followed me — so that makers could obtain the information to build wind instruments to join the strings and keyboards at the Ashmolean, Royal College, and V&A. I used to encourage makers to bring copies to the Bate and compare them with the originals. When a copy came very close but still sounded different from the original, I had them swap joints — our head in their body, their head in our body, and so on. We all learned in that way. But if I had not let them play the original instrument in the first place, they would have had no idea what sound they were aiming to reproduce.

Any fool can craft a cosmetic copy — something that looks like the original — but what is the use of that, except perhaps for a film about the life of Marin Marais, or whoever? (never, at least not after the first time — and thank God that was my instrument, not the Bate’s — would I lend an instrument to be used as a film or stage prop.) What matters is the sound of the copy; unless makers can hear the sound of the original and get some sense of what it feels like to play, they will never create a true copy.

The same goes for performers. However accurate a modern copy may be, it does not possess the feel — the magic, if you like — of the original. That’s how Tony and I inspired so many players; I remember the wide‑eyed glow on some students’ faces. I doubt many of them now are playing on originals rather than copies—wind instruments, unlike strings, don’t last forever. But how many string players have ever tried an original? And I don’t mean one that was butchered in the nineteenth century and then more-or-less hypothetically ‘restored’ to its ‘original condition’.

Can we encourage more collections to enable this kind of access? Maybe NEMA still could do something to that end. Perhaps, even twenty-five years on, NEMA could encourage performers to donate or bequeath their libraries to institutions where the materials could then be borrowed — as Cliff suggested.

Maybe it could persuade more collectors to follow the examples of Bate, Rendall, and Hunt. Maybe it could even nudge some museums to break the current mould and let at least a few of their instruments be played, borrowed, and used.

Maybe there are other things it could accomplish too. Maybe it could produce polemical fact sheets about instruments and their techniques for different periods—one single sheet per instrument or period—and distribute them around the music schools. Maybe it could release similarly brisk fact sheets on other topics covered in 1977 and circulate them to government departments, the Lottery Commission (the Lottery owes its existence to a musician, Denis Vaughan, and it was not his fault that governments broke every promise they made at its inception—that it would produce additional money for the Arts rather than replace government funding) or in other relevant bodies (God knows we spend enough from taxes and the lottery on that), and in the media. Perhaps we should set up a website and put them online.

There is still a fair amount that could be accomplished, and in many respects NEMA is perfectly placed to do it.

A paper (The Margot Leigh‑Milner Memorial Lecture) given at a NEMA Conference in 2001

© Jeremy Montagu 2017

Notes

i GSJ XXIII, 1970, 104–14. ii James Blades, Percussion Instruments and their History, Faber, 1970. Mine was published very belatedly by David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1976. iii David Roberts, Early Music: 25‑Year Index, OUP, Oxford, 1998. iv EM xi:2, April 1983, 293. v EM xi:1, January 1983, 149. vi EM x:1, January 1982, 5. vii OUP, 1978. viii J. M. Thomson, ed., The Future of Early Music in Britain, OUP, London, 1978.