When I was a piano student, I could listen for the
first time the music of Cabezón performed on a historical instrument. I was so
deeply impressed that I decided to devote my studies to that instrument. We
perform the music of the past not with the eagerness of an antiques collector,
but because its message is current and in force. But in order to take advantage
of it, one has to recover a music which was not played for centuries, and whose
performance tradition is lost.
The recovering of that tradition, in order to approach
the Truth of a piece, is the task of a performer specialized in early music.
For doing that, he needs to reconstruct such tradition with those texts and
sources which let us know something about how the music was performed. After
all, it deals about finding the relationship between musical notation and
actual sound.
The aim
of this page is to be a help for those who could be interested in this
repertory, compiling sources dealing with interpretation of early Iberian keyboard
music: metric concepts, rhythm, rhythmic alterations (inegalité), fingerings, ornaments, alterations (musica ficta),registration, etc.
In my
opinion, the foundation of such study, which now has become a scholar
discipline (performance practice, Auffürungspraxis),
lay in three pillars:
1º) The
study of the music in the light of the theory of the period, avoiding the
employ of a later paradigm, as well as of historical sources shedding light on
performance (all kind of sources: historical, theoretical, musical, iconographical,
organological). 2º) The relationship between keyboard music and vocal music,
which is always the foundation of any music in that period. 3º) The true sound
experimentation.
N.B. My
approach to performance practice based on historical judgments is developed in
this paper (in Spanish): "Praxis Interpretativa", Revista de
Musicología, XXXII, 2 (2009), 705-710, ISSN 0210-1459, download in:
