First of all, welcome to my little site dedicated to my favourite music style, the music of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. This page started as an invitation to all you EM lovers out there to come and have an email chat with me, and for not-yet EM lovers to have a go at it. When I went looking for EM MIDI files among the thousands of files out there I found that there was a big gap and decided to fill it with my own MIDIs. And so it happened to become a site - small, but cosy. Enjoy!

Some music can grip you by your very heart, and that's precisely what EM does to me. Well, some of it. It's not that I don't like modern (pop) music - I do very much -, but that doesn't touch me quite in the same way. There just isn't the same amount of feeling in most modern pop songs. Neither does classical music (never call EM classical music, please!), which does not as directly, instinctively communicate.

For example, I've once read in a booklet of a Mozart opera that in a certain aria one of the personages was oh so well characterised by the use of this or that key, but how another stylistic tool left the listener uncertain whether that was what the character was really like or whether she was only faking. Ummmm. Sorry, no, I don't hear it. Does the listener really have to recognise the key and whatever and know what that stands for? I mean, I want to go to the opera and at least roughly understand what it's about without having studied music before! It's difficult enough if the text is in ancient Italian, especially if the singers are so keenon showing off their coloratura that they forget to enunciate properly. I want to know whether a song is sad or melancholy or joyous without having to thoroughly analyse it. Of course this is a view that a large number of people (maybe even the majority?) will never subsrcibe to for fear that "serious" music will be dragged down from its upper-class pedestal.

You could say I love renaissance music for its directness (in conveying feelings or characterisations, not to mention the often quite explicitly indecent texts) and baroque music for its elegance. The use of fewer instruments and of a different, more natural-sounding singing technique makes it - how shall I say it? - lighter. Graceful.

Now why do I dislike the term "classical music"? It's due to a certain subculture that is in part (a rather large part) responsible for the fact that I was, at first, reluctant to admit my preference for EM, let alone opera, to my fellow students. You know the crowd that goes to see the standard opera repertoire dressed up to the nines, from Mozart to Strauss, indulges in name-dropping (fashionable singers and directors) and try to impress their neighbours with trips to Verona? Yep, them. And they claim to love classical music. Urgh.
In addition, I was taught that "Classical" refers to a certain era (Mozart, Beethoven and contemporaries), so the music that I love so dearly can't be classical. Nope, it's renaissance and baroque.

Now I sit here in my little eccentric Early Music corner and snigger at those who queue for tickets for Tosca or Così fan tutte or Bayreuther Festspiele. ;)

Why don't you come and join me?