Music class explores historic instruments and performance

‘Collegium Musicum’
Music class explores historic instruments and performance

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

Baroque violins, krumhorns and harpsichords aren’t instruments you’d expect to find in a 21st-century music school, but they were front and center during a recent concert at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. As part of the Collegium Musicum class, students have the opportunity to use replicas of historic instruments to play music from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque periods.

“Through playing the music from these time periods, we expose students to little-known and played works of music, and we teach them about historic performance practices,” said Peter Loewen, assistant professor of musicology.

	Baroque violins, krumhorns (above) and harpsichords aren’t instruments you’d expect to find in a 21st-century music school, but they were front and center during a recent concert at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.

Loewen and Gregory Barnett, also an assistant professor of musicology, teach the class and work with students to find the instruments and musical repertory suitable for them. The semesters’ worth of studying and practicing those instruments and music culminated in a recital and colloquium earlier this month.

“It’s pretty cool to be able to say that I’ve performed on a krumhorn in concert,” said Hilary Baker-Jennings, a Jones College sophomore. “We have been improving huge amounts all semester, and we’re all really excited to continue next semester, so the concert felt like another step in that direction.”

Baker-Jennings signed on for the course at the suggestion of Loewen. As a medieval studies major, she had taken his class on medieval- and Renaissance-era music and thought trying to play the instruments would be fun.

In concert

“Learning to play the krumhorn was actually a lot like learning a modern instrument. Our biggest problem was definitely getting to play in tune with each other,” Baker-Jennings said. “But we liked to blame the instruments. For me, the problem was not that it was a historic instrument, but that it was so different than the flute, which I’m trained in.”

The krumhorn most closely sounds like a loud kazoo, but she said it worked well for the music that was written for it. Her classmate Amalia Bandy, a Sid Richardson College freshman, also performed on a historic instrument.

“Unlike a lot of the other people in Collegium, I came in with a strong background in historical performance already, having previously studied some viola da gamba and violone in Europe,” Bandy said. “When I started at Rice this year, I was happy and actually a little surprised to find out that a world-class modern-performance school like the Shepherd School had opportunities for crossovers like me.”

Bandy was first turned on to historic performance by her brother, Dorian, who is finishing his musicological studies at Cornell University.

“He started introducing me to period instrument practices when we were very young and never stopped showing me the benefits of historically informed performance, even in a modern context,” Bandy said.

A nonmusic major, Baker-Jennings too sees how the historic can shape and frame the modern.

“The perspective that this class has given me most on modern music is appreciation for the instruments we have today. They are easy compared to the historic ones we were playing,” she said.

That physical difficulty as well as the difficulty in switching between modern and period playing is beneficial for Bandy. She said it has improved her dexterity and stimulated her mind as she pursues her studies in modern double bass.

“I find the cerebral and physical insight I’ve gained in both to be absolutely mutually beneficial,” Bandy said. “For instance, as a modern player, I can use the experience of playing the music on period instruments to guide many of my phrasing choices, while as a period player, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the technique I’m building in my modern schooling.”

Colloquium combines historic and modern

The colloquium bridged historic and modern, featuring two speakers and performers who discussed their points of view about how to put musicology — the history of music — into practice. Mimi Mitchell ’82 and Christina Scott Edelen, presented “From Archive to Stage, Transforming Musicological Research Into Concert Programs.”

“It was about music programming from a musicological standpoint, not about performance practice,” Bandy said. “In Collegium, we deal with historical performance, not programming, so I thought it was an interesting talk.”

Mitchell, a native Texan, received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees magna cum laude from Rice University before continuing her studies with Jaap Schr