0 Western music of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, written before about 1650
There are many fine musicological studies that analyse the devices used to heighten the texts of characters - male and female - in early music drama.
They will sing early music principally, but they have an instinct for new unaccompanied music as well.
In the early music dramas the heroes claim for themselves large fields of action.
To sum up these narratives: a forgotten early music is resurrected in recent times and gradually polished up to achieve a historically informed performance practice.
All other information, performance, analysis, composition needs to be drawn from this manuscript representation, as in early music, not much else has survived.
This programme has the unique quality associated with interpretations of chant by nonspecialist early music performers.
The same arguments apply here as in the endless debates on 'early music interpretation' - except we (may) have the recorded medium to help us.
It is necessary to fit early music into the larger picture of contemporary medieval music reception.
