Anne Stone, Medieval Song in 21st-Century New York

This paper will serve both as a  pre-concert talk for the Anonymous 4 concert “A Virgin Unspotted:  Medieval and Traditional Christmas Songs for Mary,” and also as a  broader meditation on the history and cultural significance of the decades-long tradition of performing medieval music in New York  City. In recent years it has become a commonplace of early music  scholarship to exclaim over how little we know about what medieval music sounded like; the history of the early music revival is thus a history of modern fantasies about medieval sound. New York  has been a particularly active hotbed of the “invention of medieval  music” (to quote the musicologist Daniel Leech-Wilkinson), since the  founding of The New York Pro Musica in 1952 by Noah Greenberg, and the Waverly Consort in 1964 by Michael Jaffee. In the  course of my talk I’ll play recorded examples of each group and discuss  how their different approaches reflect our changing expectations for  medieval music. I will focus on two issues in this discussion: programming, that is, the choice of pieces that are  arranged to make up the concert; and something I will call sound  manufacture: the choices of timbre, texture, vocal quality, and  instrumentation that together create the sound-world cultivated by the ensemble.