The Digital Generation Catches Early Music’s Third Wave 

By Brian Wise | From the November/December 2024 issue of Strings

In the list of classical music niches least likely to embrace crossover—or something akin to it—the early-music movement has always ranked near the very top. During its rise, the movement’s goal was to perform music exactly as composers intended and in the style of their time. Original texts needed to be stringently observed, and gut strings and valveless horns had to be made in a certain way. Practitioners have favored names around terms like “Antiqua” and “Schola.”

But when Ruckus, a New York–based “continuo band,” plays a siciliano from a Bach Flute Sonata, its members add a funky bass line, heavy string slapping, and almost bluesy flute acrobatics. Similarly, when the string band Acronym presents a chaconne attributed to Biber, the keyboardist adds rippling melodic licks that appear to be drawn from a Coldplay song.

And though the young ensemble Twelfth Night is perhaps less freewheeling with its source material, it is known to add staging and lighting effects to its performances, which have included New York shows in a Meatpacking District loft, at the Brooklyn Army Terminal warehouse complex, and in the Moorish lobby of the United Palace Theater, a movie palace in Upper Manhattan.

Over the last 15 years, what has been called a third wave of historical performance practice (HPP) ensembles has emerged, bringing a retooled set of priorities. Third wave advocates are not interested in the battles of the 1980s and ’90s, with their dogmatic claims to authenticity and chronological borders. Instead, they’re reclaiming some of the revolutionary spirit of the first wave (1960s and early ’70s) ensembles, bolstered by the omnivorous spirit of a digital generation.

“With the earlier generation of HPP performers, there was a big focus on authenticity,” says Kivie Cahn-Lipman, a cellist and viola da gamba player who founded Acronym in 2012. “I think the younger generations of players acknowledged that, one, we can’t really know what people were doing [in pre-Classical eras], and two, we don’t care as much. It’s less about the sort of museum-piece aesthetic of trying to recreate something from 300 years ago.”

Acronym’s ten albums emerge as gatherings of curios and treasures from the dusty corners of a flea market, spanning the quirky “Alphabet Sonatas” of the Polish-born Johann Pezel to gems from the Düben family of composers who served the Royal Swedish Court in the 1700s. 

Playing Fast and Loose with Research 

Music Before 1800, the venerable New York series that marks its 50th anniversary this season, has featured Acronym and other third-wave groups alongside more established names. “We’re really seeing the bloom right now of the third wave,” says Bill Barclay, the series’ artistic director. “This younger generation is repairing back to the revolution of the ’60s, where it’s about really risky playing, playing fast and loose with the research, avoiding the pitfalls of what is right and wrong, and getting back to the essence of the playing.”

Barclay adds that this “joyful and less fractious chapter” in the early-music movement can be attributed partly to the emergence of Juilliard’s Historical Performance program, a graduate program established in 2008 that has helped to energize New York’s once-sluggish early-music scene. “I think they try to get the musicians to eat their vegetables as much as any music conservatory does,” Barclay says of the program. “But there’s such a great flow of innovation coming through Juilliard by virtue of its placement in New York City. I just think it’s a Petri dish for idea sharing.”

Doug Balliett was a member of the second graduating class from the program at Juilliard, where he now teaches Baroque bass and violone. A performer with Ruckus, Acronym, Jupiter Ensemble, and Les Arts Florissants, he turned to early music after a stint as a double bassist in the San Antonio Symphony. “In learning all of the so-called rules of the language of historically informed playing,” he says, “I found that there’s suddenly this immense freedom in creative continuo playing and improvisation on the top [melodic] lines. These things were just expected in the Baroque period.”

Balliett hears nothing inappropriate in the adding of jazz or pop motifs to Baroque music. “Bach was absorbing all of the musical languages that he had access to and putting them into his music,” he says. “All of the great Baroque composers did that. We’re just including music of the last 200 years. If it serves the music and makes the audience happy, then why not?”

Balliett appears on Ruckus’ new album, The Edinburgh Rollick, a collection of jigs, reels, and other dances associated with the legacy of 18th-century Scottish fiddler Niel Gow. This is the “folk-Baroque” side of Ruckus, an identity that previously surfaced in “Strawberry Fields,” a program of string-slapping country dance tunes by Handel and Sancho. (Forerunners of Ruckus’ approach include the Norwegian ensemble Barokksolistene, led by violinist Bjarte Eike, known for its boisterous Alehouse Sessions.)

Ruckus was founded by several Juilliard graduates in 2017. “I wanted to make a continuo group because I’ve always been drawn to the rhythm-section vibe of Baroque music,” says co-founder Clay Zeller-Townson, a bassoonist who hires melodic instruments on a per-project basis. Other Ruckus fare is decidedly modern, as seen in “By George,” a new program pairing music of György Ligeti and Georg Philipp Telemann. In February, the group will join forces with a jazz quartet to premiere Roscoe Mitchell’s Metropolis Trilogy. 

Theatrical Twists from Twelfth Night 

Like Ruckus, Twelfth Night is an ensemble of Juilliard alumni with a lean infrastructure. As its Shakespearean-inspired name suggests, its core members, Baroque violinist Rachell Ellen Wong and keyboardist David Belkovski, have leaned into semi-theatrical programs. They include Handel cantatas and thematic offerings such as “Hell Hath No Fury,” which evokes a Handelian garden party with pieces by Porpora, Corelli, Merula, and Handel himself (the “garden” in one case included a Lower Manhattan loft). In May, the group made its Carnegie Hall debut with a program exploring “humanity’s relationship to nature.”

Twelfth Night programs offer “less a coherent theatrical piece than a certain kind of energy,” says Belkovski, “whether we’re connecting pieces with improvisation or we’re engaging with the audience through discussion or keeping the room alive and warm so that people don’t tune out.”

The one-to-a-part lineups help keep the overhead low for Twelfth Night and other third-wave groups, which often rely on performance fees and ticket sales for a large share of their income. The Gotham Early Music Scene, a nonprofit organization, offers support services to Ruckus, Twelfth Night, and other New York ensembles, assisting with marketing, ticket sales, filing taxes, and processing donations. Still, philanthropic backing is often limited.

“It’s tough to get grants in early music,” says Cahn-Lipman of Acronym, noting that potential funders look for projects with an educational or multicultural component. It is especially difficult to find surviving repertoire by composers of color from 1600 to 1750, the era that lies at the heart of the group’s programming. “We would love to be playing music by minority composers,” he says. “There’s simply no surviving music. I’ve been trying to champion music composed by women who are less known. There’s some really great stuff, but it’s difficult.”  

Digital Natives  

Coming to the gamba after studies at Oberlin and Juilliard, Cahn-Lipman was drawn to the pathbreaking recordings of Jordi Savall and his ensembles, which have explored the relationships between European traditions and those of Africa and the Middle East. Third wave players are accustomed to accessing such traditions through streaming services, playlists, and YouTube.

“Their bandwidth is free to mishmash stuff pulled from, say, a Jordi disc or a traditional brass band in Syria that they might have seen on YouTube,” says Barclay. “Then they’ll get something from a manuscript in Turkey that was recorded by a string band 30 years ago, and suddenly they see a link. Out comes this East-meets-West homage that has a completely different flavor. They’re not as tethered to whether it’s correct or not, which I think is sensational, because who cares? We want to be healed by the sounds. We want the sounds to do something to us in a space.”

Barclay finds this sensibility not only in American groups but also in many from Europe, be it France’s Jupiter Ensemble, Le Consort, and Nevermind, or in Los Temperamentos, which was founded by Colombian cellist and arranger Néstor Fabián Cortés Garzón, and which focuses on Baroque music from Latin America.

“All of the great recordings from the first generations of the early music movement are available,” notes Balliett of Juilliard. “If you have a subscription to any service, you can hear them all. The other thing with this digital age is the newest generation is good at using these tools. I think it’s as important to have some great videos on YouTube as it is to be constantly scheduling concerts.” 

Growth Potential

There remain questions of whether larger audiences await the more eclectic, obscure directions of third-wave ensembles. There are more than 100 early music groups in North America, according to Early Music America, a service and advocacy organization. Yet Barclay estimates that 90 percent of early music concerts draw fewer than 300 people.

“Early music won the battle, but it lost the war,” he says, alluding to the fact that, during the formative years, period-instrument groups successfully claimed “basically anything earlier than Haydn” as theirs. But to be sustainable, many ensembles must do their share of “hits,” including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and Handel’s Water Music.

Zeller-Townson of Ruckus says that his ensemble is not categorically against a Brandenburg or Four Seasons program, though such larger works can be expensive in themselves to stage, and the group’s current formula is working from a business perspective: its recent “Edinburgh Rollick” tour was sold out. Artistically, he talks of few limits.

“We’re playing with all the possibilities of texture at every moment,” he asserts. “Then there are pieces we really recompose because something about it speaks to us. Some pieces just need to be simple, beautiful, and not too fussed with. But some pieces you can really take a confetti cannon to and make something wildly new.”