Early Music Scores -- Early Music Guild's 20 Years Of Prudence Pays Off As It Becomes One Of The Nation's Top Early-Music Supporters

In the beginning, there were just three guys: a graduate student, a music librarian and a harpsichordist/professor. Out of their determination and expertise came the beginnings of the fledgling Early Music Guild, which emerged almost exactly 20 years ago. In those two decades, the EMG has developed into a textbook example of what a good arts organization should be: both visionary and nurturing, reaching internationally and focusing locally, all with the kind of organizational prudence that has kept it financially solvent.

Sounds like something to celebrate, in fact, which is exactly what the guild and its many fans are doing this coming Friday and Saturday in St. James' Cathedral. The official 20th anniversary concert, partly funded by the guild's recent grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, will bring together an internationally famous early-music specialist - English conductor Andrew Parrott - and top local performers (many of whom got their start under the guild's aegis) in Handel's seldom-heard "Carmelite Vespers."

Two of the founders, Jerry Kohl and John Gibbs, are still living in Seattle and active in the guild. The third, Randall Jay McCarty, died in 1989, leaving a gap in the close-knit music community that has never quite been filled. On Oct. 26, 1976, the three founders and friends got the ball rolling with the first meeting of the "Ad Hoc Committee to Discuss the Formation of an Early Music Organization in Seattle" (everything in the early-music field needs a formal title). Throughout the following winter, meetings and discussions refined the concept; a kick-off benefit was held at the Lakeside School the following spring, the Early Music Guild was formally incorporated as a nonprofit on June 30, 1977.

Why the need for an early-music organization at all?

The 1970s saw a renaissance around the world of interest in music of the 18th and earlier centuries. Original instruments, from krummhorns and sackbuts to baroque oboes and viols, were copied by contemporary instrument makers around the world, and played in a manner more consistent with original practices (in such matters as bowing, dynamics, vibrato, attack and ornamentation).

Starting with a few scholar/performers in such European centers as London and Amsterdam, then Boston/Cambridge and Berkeley, musicians turned to original treatises on how to play long-neglected instruments. Gradually an "early-music sound" evolved, and if you tune into such a performance while surfing the radio dial, you'll recognize the sound within a few seconds. The violins and other strings have a softer focus because the strings are gut, not metal, and the players use vibrato only occasionally. Wind instruments are a little more plangent and less homogenized-sounding than contemporary ones. Usually the instruments are tuned to a lower ("baroque") pitch, which means that an A sounds like today's A-flat.

When you first hear music played this way, it can sound as if everyone is playing underwater - a little muffled and underpowered. The more often you hear it, the more the original-instruments sound seems right with the period music; now, modern-instruments ensembles such as the much-recorded Academy of St. Martin in the Fields have abandoned the early-music field (roughly defined as "the millennium of music" between 800 and 1800) almost entirely to the specialists in those eras.

As the early-music movement developed, harpsichords and other early keyboards rose from near-obscurity, played not by pianists who were moonlighting, but by specialists who devoted themselves almost entirely to the earlier instruments. Even baroque vocal technique, exemplified by Seattle soprano Nancy Zylstra, was researched and refined, suiting the timbre and production of the voice to what the accompanying period instruments were doing.

The early-music revival did not spring up out of a vacuum. In Seattle, as early as the 1940s and '50s, performers such as Peter Hallock (countertenor, composer, keyboard player and founder of the St. Mark's Cathedral Compline Choir), Eva Heinitz (a legendary University of Washington viola da gamba player, cellist and teacher, now 90) and Silvia Kind (an impassioned and highly individualistic harpsichordist, also a UW emeritus prof, and also 90 this year) made an indelible mark on all those lucky enough to hear them and study with them.

The more interest in early music grew, the more it became apparent that a whole performance microcosm was necessary to sustain it: baroque violins don't sound good with modern pianos, and lutes are drowned out by modern instruments. Similarly, in order to bring in top early-music groups for concerts, a support group had to build an audience and a donor base.

Kohl, who was the guild's first president, has quipped that the organization arose because "early music fans in Seattle were simply tired of car-pooling to Vancouver, B.C., every time they wanted to hear a touring early-music group."

In Seattle, it was the guild's mission to build a critical mass for early music in this region. Crucial to that critical mass was the baby-boomer generation, which forms the nucleus of today's guild. Also crucial were the Northwest instrument makers, because so many period instruments weren't commercially available: harpsichord builder David Calhoun, recorder maker David Ohannesian and oboe maker Sand Dalton.

Before the necessary level of support had been achieved, several of the area's most promising authentic-instruments specialists had moved elsewhere, because there wasn't enough work in Seattle. Lutenist Stephen Stubbs and baroque flutist Janet See went off to Europe and England, building international reputations through their performances and recordings. Baroque violinist Stanley Ritchie and his wife, harpsichordist Elisabeth Wright, moved to Indiana University, where they became faculty members in one of the country's pioneering authentic-performance departments.

Now, the guild has been able to reverse that trend, attracting more top talent to Seattle and building a real community of performances. The arrival here more than a decade ago of Margriet Tindemans, a Dutch-born specialist on early stringed instruments, set the stage for a number of fine groups that she helped build, from the Northwest Center for Early Music Studies (a community school) to the performance groups Bones n' Drones, the Medieval Women's Choir and Medieval Strings.

Also arriving in the late '80s were harpsichordist Jillon Stoppels Dupree (who founded Gallery Concerts with fortepianist George Bozarth in 1989), Byron Schenkman and Ingrid Matthews (a harpsichord-violin duo who founded the thriving Seattle Baroque Orchestra), and baroque flutist/music history professor Maria Coldwell (who became executive director of the guild, and also president of the Early Music America).

The concert calendar has grown correspondingly, with the emergence of such groups as the Tudor Choir, Opus VII, Cappella Romana, Schola Senexis, and a minor galaxy of ensembles in such churches as St. James Cathedral and St. Mark's Cathedral. Nearly all this activity is originated, fostered or connected somehow to the guild, either through its Concert Assistance Program (which now helps 16 smaller groups a year by giving them money, mailing lists and ticket-ordering support) or its Professional Affiliates program (which similarly assists more established groups). The core of the concert-presenting activity is the International Recital Series, which presents eight well-established, commercially recorded international groups per season.

Maybe it's because the guild operated on a volunteer shoestring for so long that so much fiscal care has been taken; in any event, the group has seen its prudence rewarded - this season, by the largest NEA grant in guild history. The $7,750 will go toward presenting next weekend's concerts of the Carmelite Vespers in St. James Cathedral, where Parrott (considered the world's leading authority on this mammoth work) will preside over a crew of international soloists (sopranos Christine Brandes and Emily Van Evera, and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Lane) and Seattle-based soloists (tenor Howard Fankhauser and bass Norman Smith), along with the Tudor Choir and the Seattle Baroque Orchestra.

Don't be surprised if the performances have a certain air of festivity. The Early Music Guild is ready for a celebration.