RE: Preparing a Donor's Concert at Short Notice

Ooooohhhh... you have unleashed a torrent here!

Early Music is a specialisation of what you would know as Classical Music.

Classical Music is what you normally see around on stages... think symphony orchestras, string quartets, piano recitals, operas... that sort of thing. They use the instruments that have survived and evolved over the last few hundred years... and play music as it has been handed down from teacher to student. They think that the line is unbroken... but in fact, it is terribly broken and perverted.

Early Music involves going back to the original writings, scores, facsimiles, and treatises from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras to discover the original intent and tastes involved. And then attempting to apply them to rediscover the music in their original intent and context.

In many ways, it leads to an interpretation of "Classical" music that is much freer and closer to folk/jazz/every other genre of music before Classical musicians got carrots stuck up their arse. There is a fundamental difference in opinion in the interpretation of time and spacing (Kronos vs Kairos time)... and even how to interpret the blobs on the page... it reintroduces lost arts of improvisation and temperaments among other things... things that were never lost in other genres of music.

An analogy is the idea the comparison between modern English and Shakespearan English. You can't do a literal reading... as ideas, concepts, and even the meanings of words have changed. If you ignore that... then you get a different reading of Shakespeare that is likely NOTHING at all to do with what was intended.

Similar analogies in architecture, paintings, and everything else... Even law, take for instance the American Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Magna Carta... all had context and if you read the originals, they are difficult to parse without historical knowledge. If you apply ONLY modern knowledge, then you are mostly doing wishful interpretation...

Early Music at its heart involves a rediscovery and an attempt to recreate original intent, context, and sound... modern Classical takes the Chinese Whispers (intervening centuries of "evolution" and "well intended" changes) approach and comes up with something decent, but different.

Interestingly enough... much of what is considered "high level skills, playing, and performance" by today's modern classical musicians is derided in past treatises and masters as "amateur and beginner"!

Early Music is not a monolithic genre though... some are much more academic... and some are much more performance based. And everyone has their particular niche genres of time in history.