Welcome to Keith McGowan: Art & Heresy, a place to look at history through art and music. I’m a historian, musician and language nerd who combines these interests to investigate European social diversity from Antiquity to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Dreamy Keith used to imagine a music history book with just headings on blank pages to represent the all the music we’ve lost. Now I sometimes describe my work as an attempt to write an account of art history that includes people overlooked in the first edition.
Musicologist Nino Pirrotta (‘The Oral and Written Traditions of Music’, 1984) describes the focus of the modern early music movement as rather like the tip of an iceberg, writing history based on the one-eighth of music that happens to have survived in notation. Historical performance's obsession with manuscripts, scores and publications, amplified by the commercial incentive for recordings and festivals which big up the 'The Glory, The Splendour, The Triumph and Treasures of a European Golden Age', has produced a beautiful but shrunken recreation of early music-making, while drawing a veil over the great social and cultural diversity that existed among early artists. The blog will take a deep dive to look for the art and people of the submerged seven-eighths.
If you find anything in my work that might help your own project, do reference it, citing the Keith McGowan: Art & Heresy blog in your bibliography in the usual way. Art and Heresy is intended to arouse interest and encourage fresh discussion: you can message me at crouchendpiper at threads dot net
