‘Alte Musik’ or ‘Early Music’?

Abstract

AbstractAn attempt to distinguish between ‘alte Musik’, as German musicians used to conceive it, and ‘early music’, as is now the common phrase in English, provides a new – and perhaps better – lens through which to view the old historical schisms of twentieth-century music. The recourse that musical innovators have always had to ancient precedents, as inspiration and as validation, has many variations, and these variations are reliable reflectors of aesthetic attitudes.