Music professor unravels mysteries of early music
January 23rd, 2006
Jack Ashworth and student John Aurelius rehearse on early recorder replicas.
The sackbut, krumhorn, and lizard — musical instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance — still have a place in a world increasingly dominated by MP3 files, computer chips and synthesizers, thanks to musicians like Jack Ashworth and his early music students at the University of Louisville.
A virtuoso on dozens of antique instruments, Ashworth specializes in music dating from roughly 900 to the early 1700s — an era of musical history cloaked in mystery so vast that Ashworth said he has barely scratched its surface in his 28 years studying, teaching and performing early music at U of L.
“In music from the late 18th century to today, scores tell you what instruments are to be played and include articulation marks, speed markings and indications of dynamics — how loudly or softly to play.” he said. “Earlier music often tells us few or none of these things — and that makes it a challenge to study, perform and teach.“
Ashworth is something akin to a musical detective.
“My job as a scholar of performance practice is to figure out what the options are — and there often are no set answers,” he said.
“It is mysterious,” said masters student Allen Gilfert of early music, “and because of that I felt an urge to get to know it better.”
Studying and playing early music in Ashworth’s class and as part of the Early Music Ensemble “was kind of like treasure hunt,” he said. “You didn’t quite know what you would find, but you knew it would be interesting and that not many people know about it.”
“Early music allowed me as a student to recreate a musical past, and consequently I was able to form an independent perception about what that past was,” said Gilfert, who is a music history major. Studying early music also allowed him to see connections between the past and the present and to “learn new and exciting things about present from the past.”
Making music the old fashioned way, however, is not just an academic pastime. The Early Music Ensemble, a group of students, music faculty, staff and community players, performs throughout the year at community events and in concert at the School of Music. Since 1977, which Ashworth became its director, membership has grown from seven to 35.
This growth and other developments point to a wider acceptance of early music in recent years, Ashworth said.
“It used to be that classical radio stations would never play anything earlier than Bach, but now they play all kinds of earlier music” he said.
“There’s been a cultural shift in academe” in the three decades of Ashworth’s teaching career: “It’s now thought that you must have at least some exposure to early music to have a good musical education,” he said.
