Last night, after a class that Sister Maria Philomena taught, concerned in part with chant notation, Sister Marie Therese and I were discussing the comparative merits of chant notation and modern notation. The conversation segued into a different topic (as conversations involving me generally do), namely, the comparative merits of modern instruments and “period instruments,” which is the generic name given to instruments used during the period of the music’s composition, whether it be Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, etc.
In my youth, I was of the mind that modern instruments were superior, and therefore there should be no argument about which is better to perform the music, no matter when it was written. Why hear an out of tune cornetto trying to squeak out a high note when you can listen to a modern piccolo trumpet nail it with clarity? Or why a bass sackbut with an awkward handle to control the slide, when modern bass and contra-bass trombones are so much better engineered? (And if you want completely bombastic, why not go for the cimbasso, used to great effect in film scores for its edgy and aggressive low register.) There is no doubt that the modern instruments are superior feats of engineering.
As I’ve matured, I’ve come to appreciate the character of the period instruments, which had very different timbres from their modern counterparts. These have a beauty of their own, especially (so I think) when the brass instruments and the string instruments of the period are combined. I often like them better now. But the performers have to be really good, or the challenge of playing in tune on period instruments is not met.
When I was a teenager, I got hooked on the music of Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1554/1557 – 12 August 1612), the Venetian organist and composer who performed both of those functions for Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice,1 custom crafting music to be played antiphonally from various choir lofts of that amazing patriarchal basilica for a real “surround sound” experience.
Here are some Gabrieli pieces on modern and period instruments for comparison.
Canzon Duodecimi Toni:
Period Instruments —
Modern Instruments —
Sonata Pian’e Forte (literally, the “soft and loud” sonata, famously the first piece of music with written dynamics on the score):
Period Instruments —
Modern Instruments —
Canzon septimi toni, which is probably the best example for this comparison due to the fairly equal matching of the ensembles (from the point of view of virtuosity; the period group does have strings, while the modern ensemble doesn’t):
Period Instruments —
Modern Instruments —
And for a different comparison, here is Gabrieli’s: Beata es Virgo sung and then played on period instruments:
Voices —
Period Instruments —
For entirely nepotistic reasons, I’m throwing in one without a period-instrument counterpart (I could find none) because my brother is on the album, playing tuba with his teacher, Sam Pilafian (RIP) and the other virtuosi of the Empire Brass:
Here is an entire concert of music of Gabrielli and Henrich Schutz with voices and period instruments. You can see a bass (or maybe contra-bass) sackbut in it, played very well:
- As I write, it happens to be the eve of the feast of Saint Laurence Justinian, the first Patriarch of Venice. September 5 this year is also the tenth anniversary of the death of Brother Francis. ↩
