Today a blog post in English, inspired by one of many things from the amazing Dutch volunteer based music broadcasting organisation called Concertzender.

I’ve learned so many things about music and about musicians and other people in the more than 10 years I have been listening to Concertzender.

Let me first introduce a song sung by the countertenor Alfred Deller using a falsetto voice.

Alfred Deller, was an English singer and has been important in the development of the HIP music movement : the Historically Informed Performance.

I think it was very interesting and also kind of funny to hear via Concertzender that there was once, long time ago, an action named Aktie Notenkraker (this web link is in Dutch only) at a very well-known concert hall in Holland. This happened around the time the Provo movement (web link in English again) was a thing. Musicians disrupted at a well-known concert hall and started their action speech with something along the lines like this :

“Every note of Mozart played in the Concert hall is a lie from A till Z”

Of course this was probably exaggerated for shock value but I think there was an interesting lesson to be learned from that. Take for example, take Bach, the old J.S. Bach who played organ, violin and harpsichord. During his life there were no pianos, and he only briefly had very little experience with a pianoforte. Harpsichord have no options to vary in volume like is possible with the pianos nowadays.

Also the material of some instruments was different. For example the musical family with Belgian musician Sigiswald Kuijken like to perform on instruments that are as authentic as possible.

Back to Alfred Deller. Here’s a recording of a song that I love :