ROLF LISLEVAND
What? How can our most prestigious musical oddball award go to a person more than 300 years old? Of course this question just points out a historical prejudice: supposing that the only artistic nuts crazy enough to know about are contemporary. But think back a century earlier than Kapsberger to visual artists like Matthias Grunewald or Hieronymus (maybe there’s something in the name) Bosch. Bosch’s work included images of upside-down masturbating men with cracked orbs coming out of their anuses, depicted next to a guy putting the make on a giant owl. Don’t try to tell me these guys weren’t disturbingly, brilliantly, genuinely strange.
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A flurry of revived ancient music is hitting the market these days, from chart-topping monks to the NPR-approved medieval polyphonic chantresses Anonymous 4. Of course some of the fuss is akin to the exoticism currently driving “world music”–that sort of “hey, wow, that’s different!” energy that can lead to a throwaway attitude toward music of different cultures. But at its best, historical exoticism brings into focus the wide range of music made at any point in time–which debunks the conservatism of the canon and the attendant defense of “the classics.” Kapsberger’s music is not of that stock, to his credit.
