The concept of historically informed performance thrives on the conviction that today’s musicians can find knowledge in the documentation which has survived from past musical practices: musical notation, descriptions of performances, treatises, methods, visual representations of music-making, or playable instruments. Unfortunately, this documentation, which we performers assiduously track down and study, is still missing the one crucial element of musical performance which we most need: the actual sound, the physical presence of a living master. Barring the discovery of time-travel, we shall never meet our master. Deprived of this essential face-to-face musical experience, we are forever doomed to confront our own past musical cultures “through a glass darkly.”

Although challenging enough for most early European repertoires, it has obviously not kept generations of performers and scholars from fashioning—for instance, in Baroque music—a thriving early music scene, with venerated living musicians and identifiable contemporary traditions, so that our vision of the past seems bright and clear. However, the situation becomes much more complex and clouded when we seek to perform medieval song. Medieval monophonic song is situated at the volatile crossroads of oral tradition and the scriptorium, of voices and instruments, of Latin and the vernacular, and is the principal vehicle for musical practices which rarely, if ever, were described by medieval musicians in a manner that speaks to our condition. We sometimes know how this music was performed, but we will never know how it sounded.

Most of us enjoy listening to recordings of medieval song and attending live concerts, the majority of which present these early repertoires in the guise of a straightforward and polished chamber music concert. And yet, in today’s world of medieval music you can also experience a concert presented as meditative pseudo-liturgy; as ironic, edgy cabaret; as ponderous mystery play or cute, costumed courtly entertainment; as ecstatic ethnic hum-along; as dutiful list of music history examples; or as Society for Creative Anachronism free-for-all. In short: medieval song, having no ancient living traditions of its own, thrives even in the harshest of environments and adapts easily to the disguises we performers require it to inhabit.

Both performers and musicologists like to believe that efforts to understand medieval repertoires inexorably lead us closer and closer to modern performances that might justifiably be labelled “historically informed.” Yet, many forces that are helping to shape the way musicians of the twenty-first century perform medieval music are anything but historical. The perceived demands of the public (“the market”), and the contemporary tastes and intuitions of the performers inform today’s music-making as much as do any medieval sources. Today’s medieval performers—musical survivalists, all of us—have had to learn to reconcile economic reality with a desire to recreate a convincing sounding image of the past.

It is the principal medium of that sounding image—the vinyl LP, followed by the CD and the technologies which will replace the CD—which has increasingly become the potent instrument calling the tune of how medieval music will sound in our time. The classical recording industry has changed radically from the days when an LP recording of medieval music was considered a success if it sold a few hundred copies. By today’s standards, these early recordings had laughably modest budgets, the packaging was subdued and scholarly, and the performers were relatively unknown. The expansion of interest in medieval music and the presence on the scene of certain charismatic performers during the 1960s and 70s began to change the way medieval music was studied, performed, recorded, and perceived by its listeners.

But it was the appearance of the CD and the subsequent huge opening of the market for recorded sound in the 1980s and 1990s that transformed the situation dramatically. This period of commercial expansion also witnessed the phenomenon of “chant mania” (millions of Gregorian chant CDs sold, mostly to kids) and the obscuring of the borders between medieval music and the “New Age” (medieval music as a source of relaxation for adults and a harbinger of the “crossover” market yet to come). Recording budgets increased, packaging became more lavish and professional, and we saw the emergence of a canon of medieval works which, like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, could be profitably recorded again and again without saturating the market.

Along with the canon, there is the modern phenomenon of the fixed “medieval ensemble,” a group usually consisting of three or four performers, forced to accommodate itself to a huge variety of repertoires. Clearly a structure inherited from the world of chamber music, rock bands, and the folk revival, these small ensembles turn out to be an economic necessity as well: such compact groups can tour in a cost-effective way (for instance, they fit into one taxi). More significantly, the proliferation of trios and quartets has helped set norms for sound quality and performance practice which listeners have come to accept as the “sound” of medieval music. These ensembles tend to fall into two categories: same-sex groups of vocalists, with a sound ideal that stresses homogeneity and perfect tuning, and mixed ensembles of singers and instruments, which tend to encourage the image of medieval solo song as chamber music. However, I think most historians would doubt that medieval Europe was in the thrall of a half-dozen professional touring ensembles, each consisting of a handful of attractive, literate, and well-nourished men and women in their 30s and 40s, with all their teeth intact.

Along with recordings, the institution of the concert also informs our perceptions of the performance of medieval music. Audience expectations for the overall concert experience—comfortable, well-lit churches, chapels, and concert halls, program notes, pre-concert lectures, an atmosphere of reverent silence, and standardized concert length—have had an influence on the presentation of medieval music. For example, in dealing with the confrontation between medieval and modern concepts of time, today’s musicians have been forced to make tortured decisions, truncating extremely long or repetitive pieces (liturgical chant, long poems) so that the program does not seem excessively “austere” or “monotonous” and thereby alienate the audience, or worse, the presenter—ever notice how almost all advertising for medieval concerts contains the reassuring code-phrase “rich and varied”?

This fear of alienation is a slippery slope descending towards the ridiculous, as any serious ensemble which has tried dressing up in pointy shoes and pretending to be “medieval” can attest. In recordings made today (also limited in time: a maxed-out CD holds 74 minutes), we expect pristine acoustics, utter silence in the pauses, and perfection in sound-quality, all bearing witness to the heavy classical-music baggage that medieval musicians must schlepp with them. We have placed each piece we record in the digital equivalent of a sanitized and well-labeled, bulletproof glass exhibition case, and we cannot seem to imagine a different (yet musically honest) reality than this one.

The 1990s witnessed the emergence of successful ensembles whose wide popularity proved that medieval music could penetrate even the highest echelons of the classical music world. For those who have thus escaped from the “early music ghetto” into the musical mainstream, this well-deserved recognition and freedom can be a mixed blessing. The sophisticated marketing of recordings (or, to use record-company jargon: “the product”) has further helped to raise the expectations of critics, listeners, and other performers for these prominent groups as they work to remain artistically viable (and physically healthy) under the heavy burdens of recording, promoting, touring, and preparing new projects.

As the recording industry continues to expanded into new markets and as the barriers of musical genre melt away, performances of medieval music have increasingly appeared in the “crossover” category, and we find new productions which mix medieval repertoires with traditional music, improvised music, or with contemporary works written especially with certain medieval performers’ unique abilities and sounds in mind. In this, the next generation of aspiring young performers has found new “medieval” role models for the future.

What do we really know about the sound of medieval music? We know that it is the sound of our own “historically informed imaginations” as we view the past through the powerful lens of the present.

Benjamin Bagby is director and co-founder of the medieval music ensemble Sequentia. He lives in Paris.