History of The Term
Though historically the term only came into use in the late seventeenth century and with reference only to English music, some more recent writers have applied the term retrospectively to music of earlier periods and of different nationalities, and—through a confounding of the terms "broken music" with "broken consort"—more specifically to a six-part instrumentation popular in England from the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, contemporaneously referred to as an "English consort" (Kennedy and Kennedy 1994).
In late sixteenth-century England the word "consort" on its own was normally applied to groups of diverse instruments coming from different families (Boyden 1957, 228–29), and the sense of the term "broken" in the Elizabethan period refers primarily to division, the "breaking" of long notes into shorter ones (Edwards 2001, §3). "It is the shimmering effect of this ‘sweet broken music’ that so delighted audiences then and continues to cast its spell today" (Harwood 1978, 611).
Read more about this topic: Broken Consort
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or term:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)