Although Stef Conner’s music has always been connected to the imagined soundscapes of the distant past, posing serious questions about what the music of the ancient world might actually have sounded like has been something of a pipe dream until now. Her current Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at University of Huddersfield at last allows her to indulge her passion for antiquity in greater depth, moving beyond composition and historically-inspired performance into the dangerous but enticing realm of reconstruction.
Borrowing the term ‘Very Early music’ from the marketing of the 2014 Galway Early Music Festival to describe their activities, Stef and her collaborator Barnaby Brown have set themselves the challenge of not only performing, arranging and reconstructing ancient music (together, individually and in collaboration with others) but also providing transparent commentaries on each of their musical outputs, in order to stimulate further collaboration, constructive critique and rigorous discourse, and to enhance the accountability, transparency and reproducibility of their own work.
Although the hope is, naturally, that some of these commentaries will be published in peer-reviewed journals, it is not realistic to expect every single musical output drawn from ancient evidence to be supported by extensive, detailed original research. Sometimes musicians just want to play music! And research already exists in the world that we have the privilege of drawing on, even though the complex nature of that research means that our understanding of it will sometimes be flawed. In view of that complexity, it is sometimes tempting for historically informed performers to hide the inevitable gaps in their knowledge by obfuscating the relationship between evidence and intuition in their practice. Owning those knowledge gaps is therefore an important part of the quest for transparency. However uncertain the interpretation of a music is, some performative choices must always be made, whatever the level of performers’ expertise (and the older the music is, the more complicated those choices become). Thus, every musical performance—by its very nature—adopts a position on questions about ancient performance practice—if we choose to sing an ancient song but we don’t know what sort of vocal technique was appropriate for its genre, we must nevertheless choose a vocal technique, or we cannot sing it at all! Sometimes choices are personal, aesthetic ones; sometimes they are supported by historical justification. In making their own working methods transparent, Stef and Barnaby hope they will help to prevent the former being mistaken for the latter, leading to, either, false authority being conferred on aspects of performances that do not merit it, or evidence-based judgements being assumed to be subjective ones and hence deemed unworthy of scholarly attention. Stef and Barnaby’s commitment to elucidate their decision-making process in all cases means that a simpler, more concise, relatively informal medium is required for commentaries on smaller projects, or projects in which the majority of musical choices are creative rather than evidence-based. At least for the duration of her Research Fellowship, Stef will strive to provide a commentary on all musical outputs that are drawn from ancient sources, whether her engagement with those sources be in-depth or superficial. Stef and Barnaby seek to emulate models of best practice in experimental archaeology and historically informed performance in developing their own framework for the practice of experimental Very Early music. Some of Barnaby’s illuminating commentaries are available on the Workshop of Dionysus website, created in collaboration with the European Music Archaeology Project.
You can read Stef’s blog on her Very Early music projects below:
