Histories in Sound: Disseminating Medieval Music
Submitted 31/10/03
Timothy Day
British Library Sound Archive, London
http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/wam.html
tim.day@bl.uk
Gwendolyn Tietze
Department of Music, King's College London
gwendolyn.tietze@kcl.ac.uk
Hannah Vlček
NMC Recordings Ltd, London
hannahv@nmcrec.co.uk
Desired mode of presentation
Talk with audio examples
Background in historiography
Although modern editions of medieval polyphony became available in the early twentieth
century, musicologists struggled to make medieval music accessible. Published music
histories had limited success in making this repertoire more familiar, but recordings
presented new opportunities to bring its sound to life.
Background in study of recordings
HMV’s The History of Music in Sound (HMS) was an attempt to create a recorded historical
anthology. From the 1930s, similar projects had been undertaken by Columbia, Parlophone,
and the Anthologie Sonore, for example. These were didactic in nature and provided a
platform for musicologists keen to educate the public. Medieval music was not well
represented in them, but HMS began to extend this repertoire in the 1950s.
Background in manuscript studies and performance practice
Very little fourteenth-century polyphony appeared in the anthologies, despite the availability
of at least some scholarly editions; clearly the repertoire presented challenges to both
performers and audiences.
Aims


To explore, through a detailed study of HMS, aspects of performance and reception of
medieval music
To assess HMS in the context of other anthologies
Main contribution
HMS, issued in 10 volumes from 1953-1959, originated in a BBC radio series. Nineteen
hours of music were published on 78rpm shellac discs (Day 2000, 85) with explanatory
booklets containing substantial music examples and texts. On the principle that "music must
be heard to be fully appreciated" (Hughes & Abraham 1960, vii), the HMS was intended to
accompany the New Oxford History of Music (NOHM), published 1954-1990. The recordings
were meant for use by students as well as by the interested public.
Unlike its predecessors on Columbia and Parlophone, HMS included examples of 14thcentury polyphony (secular songs and an excerpt of Machaut's Mass). Performance
standards varied considerably. For the medieval repertoire, one of the most frequently
recorded, and also best reviewed, groups was Safford Cape's Pro Musica Antiqua (also
recorded on Anthologie sonore and Archiv Produktion).
HMS attracted mixed reviews, both for its occasionally less-than-perfect artists and recording
standards, and its comparatively narrow selection of works, which by the 1950s appeared
dated. In some cases this may have contributed to the decision to re-record certain works for
HMS's reissue on LP in the 1960s.
Implications
Musicologists, in particular English scholar-performers, saw themselves as informing public
taste; choosing works to represent vast and largely unknown areas of musical history on
record could give them a powerful voice.
Whilst these anthologies could introduce the medieval repertoire to the general listener, the
recordings of HMS themselves reflect the changing tastes in early music performance of the
1950s and 60s.
References


Timothy Day: A Century of Recorded Music (London, 2000).
Dom A. Hughes and G. Abraham, eds. New Oxford History of Music, Vol. 3: Ars Nova
and the Renaissance, 1300-1540 (London, 1960).
Recordings

The History of Music in Sound, vol. III: Ars Nova and the Renaissance. His Master’s
Voice HMS 20-31, HLP 5-6, HLPS 7.
Biographies
Name
Current position
Main fields of research
Timothy Day
Curator of Western Art Music, British Library Sound Archive
Discography; history of recording and listening;
Historiography; the early music revival; Pierre Boulez
Recent research includes
 A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (Yale University Press, 2000)
 'But what exactly was performance?', chapter in The Future of Performance (Cambridge
University Press, forthcoming)
 'Who needs old recordings', keynote lecture at The Organ in Recorded Sound: An
Exploration of Timbre and Tempo, an international conference at Arizona State
University, Tempe, January 2002
_______________________________________________________________
Name
Current position
Main fields of research
Current research
Gwendolyn Tietze
Doctoral student, King's College London
Historiography; reception history of early music; early
recordings of medieval music
PhD “Writing the Middle Ages: Medieval Music in the 1920s" (in
progress)
Papers include
 ‘Medieval Music in the 1920s: Rudolf von Ficker’s Imaginations, Writings and
Performances,’ 39th RMA Annual Conference, Cardiff, September 2003.
 ‘The Biographies of Medieval Composers,’ round table session with Christopher Page
and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 37th RMA Annual Conference, London, October 2001.
________________________________________________________________
Name
Current position
Main fields of research
Recent research
Hannah Vlček
Administrator, NMC Recordings, London
Manuscript studies, 14th-century repertory manuscripts,
performance practice
PhD, "Manuscript Accidentals in the Music of Guillaume de
Machaut", King's College London, 2002