The recorder is often seen as the daggy instrument you first played at primary school.
But a small group of 50-somethings are doing all they can to change the reputation of the well-known instrument.
Each Friday in the middle of Brisbane’s CBD, the women come together to play recorders of all shapes and sizes.
As someone who has lived next door to primary school aged children who were very conscientious about practising their recorder, I feel this quote deep in my soul:
"I thought recorders were simple enough especially since they play them in primary schools.
“Little did I know, it’s easy to make a note, it’s not easy to play well.”
I don’t even know what half of those words mean. I am quite uncultured. Sometimes I hear tinkling pianos and slidey violins on the radio and it sounds nice. That’s about the limits of my musical involvement.
Actually I played bassoon back in the day so I’m kinda hamming it up a whisker, but I was no JS Mozart Beethoven.
You probably already know this then, but for anyone genuinely unfamiliar:
Baroque is an artistic period that followed shortly after the end of the Middle Ages (what we think of as medieval), and so naturally shares similarities to medieval music in terms of instruments and compositional techniques. Composers during that period, like Telemann, were often commissioned by royals and had their works performed at court, which is another reason we associate them with that “medieval” sound.
Soloists in concertos and other works composed for a specific instrument often add visual flourishes to their performance. I guess part of it is to enhance the overall feeling from the perspective of the audience, but I’m sure the soloists also feel genuinely passionate about the music and like to express themselves while performing it.
At least in music (I don’t know about architecture and other artforms), the Baroque era comes after the Renaissance, so it’s quite a long way removed from mediaeval—about 150–200 years removed, to be precise.
It depends what you’re using to classify the beginning and end of periods in history and culture. The Middle Ages has been said to have lasted as late as 1500, with Baroque beginning as early as 1600, which would suggest at most a century between them. Within the context of classical music, that is a fairly short amount of time. If you were specifically focusing on music itself, those eras could begin and finish earlier as they aren’t necessarily directly tied to other aspects of history.
Of course, human culture does not have hard transitions but rather gradually evolves over time, particularly when it comes to art, so even with the Renaissance separating the Baroque and Medieval eras of music there are still similarities between them.
The precise starts and ends of musical periods are obviously fuzzy and any attempt to definitively say that this is where it is is inevitably going to be wrong.
That said, I still find it a fun conversation to have for its own sake. People naturally like to find ways to put things into discrete boxes. And as a rule of thumb, I’ve always used Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo as the start of the Baroque, but I don’t really have a marker for the start of the Renaissance. (For completeness, my usual marker for where Baroque music ends is the death of Bach, and the Romantic period starts with Beethoven’s 3rd symphony—that last is the only one I feel particularly strongly about as more than just a convenient marker.)
But if we say 100 years, I don’t agree that it’s a short time. The entire common practice period lasted about 3 centuries, so a 1 century gap is pretty significant when you think about how much music evolved over that time. Obviously there are some notable similarities—particularly in timbre—between mediaeval and Baroque music. However—and maybe this is just my bias as someone whose study mostly focused on the common practice period and 20th century, and whose personal interest is mostly in the Romantic and 20th century—I think that the differences between the Baroque and mediaeval are pretty stark, with the Baroque having more in common with Classical and even Romantic eras.