Forsaking 'Authenticity'

There was a time when any self-respecting recording of early music advertised itself as "authentic." Concerts of medieval or Renaissance music were exercises in time travel, with "historically informed" performances on "period instruments" promising to take the listener back to the way music sounded half a millennium ago, complete with quaint tunings and archaic pronunciations of Latin or French. Recently, however, some of the most innovative renditions of pre-Classical music are more likely to be found in the jazz section of a record store.

Take, for example, "The Art of Love," a CD of songs by Guillaume de Machaut released this month by Deutsche Grammophon, otherwise a bastion of mainstream classical music. The list of contributing artists includes jazz icons Madeleine Peyroux, Brad Mehldau and Milton Nascimento, pop singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant and Moroccan sintir virtuoso Hassan Hakmoun. In their hands, Machaut's fluid melodies sound by turn funky, dreamy or haunting. And while a certain otherworldly quality hovers over the entire album, there is little to indicate that the music was written 600 years ago.

The album is part of a recent wave of early-music recordings that show a radical disregard for concerns of historical authenticity. By reclaiming the freedom to improvise on musical texts and adding unashamedly anachronistic arrangements and instruments, they turn the music by medieval and Renaissance composers such as Guillaume Dufay, Machaut or John Dowland into something more akin to jazz or avant-garde pop. And yet, proponents of the "new early music" argue that what their art loses in authenticity it more than makes up for in fidelity to the creative ethos of the time.

"For me medieval music and Machaut in particular represent a time when classical music had not yet become classical music," says Robert Sadin, the producer of "The Art of Love." "There is a certain mood of intense pathos that you see in most classical-music performances, and Machaut doesn't have that. His music seemed more in touch with the way we live; it seemed very close."

As a classically trained conductor and a former member of the music faculty at Princeton, Mr. Sadin is not immune to the scruples that make classical-music performance an art of interpretation rather than creation. But in the music of the distant past—Machaut, a French poet, court secretary and composer, died in 1377—the extreme scarcity of written documents can be liberating. While there are recordings of pianists who had studied under Liszt and conductors who had learned from Wagner, Mr. Sadin says, in the case of very early music "you're not going against what we know." In the case of Machaut, "all we have is a poem and a melody—so everything else was ours."

Another musician who has taken liberties with early music is John Potter, a tenor and professor of musicology at the University of York in England, whose recent recordings also reimagine, rather than aim to re-create, Renaissance and early Baroque music. In a series of recordings for ECM, he joins jazz musicians John Surman and Barry Guy in hauntingly beautiful renditions of songs by John Dowland and his contemporaries. Trained in the English choral tradition at King's College Cambridge and a longtime member of the Hilliard Ensemble, Prof. Potter experienced firsthand the shift in attitudes within the early-music movement.

"The term authenticity has gradually been modified over the years as people have realized that, ultimately, you can't reproduce anything from the past," Prof. Potter says. "In the '80s we were worrying about questions of authenticity partly because a lot of the driving force behind the early-music revival came from academia. Musicology is a written discipline: it looks back to documents to legitimize the way you can do certain things. But very often this gives you a very false sense of what the past was like. So over the years we have given ourselves permission to look beyond the written documents."

Take Josquin des Prez, who at his death in 1521 was the most famous composer of his age. "All of his music survives as vocal scores, as if it were sung by choirs. But you also get enormous amounts of transcriptions, especially for lutes. The authenticity movement would have gone back to the printed [vocal] scores. But we now know that those were just the way the music was first presented, and you then used the music in whatever way you thought appropriate."

In Prof. Potter's musical vision, that can include the use of the saxophone alongside a baroque violin, as on the best-selling CD "Care-charming Sleep," or fusing 600-year-old songs of love and faith with a shimmering electronic soundscape, as in "Being Dufay," a project he recorded with composer Ambrose Field.

World music is also a strong influence, with ethnic instruments making frequent appearances in early-music performances. The music of North Africa in particular provides color on recordings such as "Siwan," an exploration of the music of pre-Expulsion Andalucia featuring Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui alongside Norwegian jazz and baroque musicians. Some scholars believe that there was a strong Moorish influence on the Western European culture of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, some of which can be re-created by tapping into the folk traditions of the Maghreb. The English word "lute," for example, is derived from the North African oud.

The authenticity of sound so sought after by the first generation of early-music specialists thus gives way to a new ideal of being faithful to the creative approach of the period. "We can assume that someone performing in the 14th or 15th century would have worked much more like an improvising pop musician today than like someone from a music department," says Prof. Potter. In any case, his own research into the history of performance has impressed upon him the inadequacy of printed sources when it comes to faithfully rendering how music used to be played. "If a Martian came down and had a look at some Duke Ellington sheet music and tried to re-create the music from that, he'd be unlikely to hit on anything remotely like what Ellington sounded like."

Ms. da Fonseca-Wollheim writes about classical music for the Journal.

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