turpin d'isigny-ffytche wrote:

> John can you tell us something of Thomas Binkley and his association 
> with Indiana?  There is scarcely a trace of this man in the net, but 
> one hears that he was doing things at the time that would seem to make 
> him a very influential figure - thinking here of his referring to north 
> african traditional musis as evidence about the character of secular 
> music in Europe in otherwise inaccessible times*


Oh, Binkley was a very talented composer, produced a number
of musically riveting recordings (I never heard him perform
live) based on early medieval (troubadour, trouvere,
minnesinger) music. He didn't represent himself that way,
though; he wrote that he was recreating medieval musical
practice. It's true that the written musical sources are
just the bare bones and the documentation in theorists and
such hint at a very rich performance practice that we don't
know very much about, but you can't recreate a body from a
skeleton and some shadows.

My favorite recording of Binkley's is of troubadour music.
He postulated a heavy Arabic influence, which is patently
obvious (as a glance at the instrumentarium will show), but
then proceeded to structure performances along the lines of
 specific (modern) Moroccan forms. This is like noting the
New World influence on Chinese cuisine (tomatoes, corn,
potatoes) and concluding that the Chinese eat tacos.

We actually don't know very much about troubadour musical
performance - Elizabeth Aubrey's excellent book pulls
together every scrap of evidence we have; she herself
performs the music in a sort of minimalist (also musically
successful) way, adding only a small amount to the written
sources. Binkley would take a few lines of written material
and expand it to 20 minutes. Musically it works well; as for
historical accuracy, well, it depends if you like evidence
or not.

Binkley's Carmina Burana recording is demonstrably
inaccurate. The notation in the manuscript doesn't specify
pitches, but it does give the direction (go up, go down,
stay on the same pitch), and Binkley's performance doesn't
always follow the notation. Inevitably, some of it sounds as
though he had Orff on the brain; that piece has a prion-like
effect.



regards,
 stuart

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