I was thinking as I wrote a paper about Arvo Pärt about this comic below, but how it pertained to music. When people who aren’t really informed about early classical music listen, they probably can’t tell the difference between the Ars Nova and other renaissance music (maybe not even that and medieval or Baroque!). Even though the differences in the musics are so great, it would worse than someone listening to high Romantic music and high Classical and declaring them the same.
What in writing a paper on Pärt led me to think of this? In his work Te Deum he uses musical effects coming from medieval church music (responsory and chant) and the idea of drones drawn from medieval Eastern Orthodox music (mind you medieval Eastern Orthodox music was the dominant music of the Orthodox church well into the west’s Baroque period). You might ask, “well what’s the problem, he is using medieval music!” The problem is that they come from very different geographies. Clumping these two musics together is like saying Ravi Shankar and Bobby McFerrin belong in the same category of music. Essentially because the effects Pärt is using are “old” sounding, listeners generalize and say, “Oh what wonderful medieval music!”
This is very true! It is important to do proper documentation and archiving of classical and medieval music so that future generation will be able to accurately identify which type of music is which.
By the way, I’d like to share these medieval minstrel music videos for everyone!