Introduction Membership Yearbook Register Performer People Contacts Links Fora Events
 
 

More about The National Early Music Association UK
  The National Early Music Association of the United Kingdom was founded as the result of a conference in 1977 entitled The Future of Early Music in Britain. At that time there was a strongly-felt need for a coordinating body for the many strands of early-musical activity in Britain and elsewhere and Nema was set up to meet this need and to promote the appreciation and performance, amateur and professional, of Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music.

In the intervening thirty years, the ‘early music movement’ has grown out of all recognition and the needs of scholars, performers and listeners have changed. Today Nema works alongside the regional Early Music Fora, which run practical workshops and courses, the National Centre for Early Music in York, and the Early Music Network which promotes professional performance of early music and is especially involved with the encouragement of young artists through competitions and showcases. Nema has also established links with early music organisations throughout the world.

Nema is still conscious of its role as a voice for the early music community in the UK when this is needed, for instance in the recent debate on the changes to UK law on licensing of performance spaces.

Nema, in conjunction with Ruxbury Publications, produces two important publications, which the Association’s members receive as part of their annual subscription.

The Early Music Yearbook is an invaluable handbook including
  • a Directory listing sources of information, societies, music publishers, providers of performing material, concert promoters and artists' agents, record companies, early music fairs and courses, including summer schools.
     
  • a Buyers' Guide to some 600 makers of early musical instrument worldwide.
     
  • a Register giving names and addresses of over 2400 individual early-music enthusiasts, including details of their instruments and interests.

Nema news and events:-

Early Music Performer is Nema’s twice-yearly magazine, edited by the Leeds University musicologist Dr Bryan White, with an editorial board of well-known scholars and performers; this successor to Nema’s former magazine, Leading Notes, makes available the most important new scholarship to practising early musicians, and keeps its readers up to date with the latest news from the world of historically informed performance.

In recent years, Nema has organized conferences on early keyboard instruments, the hornpipe, on the development of wind instruments and the change from renaissance to baroque. The proceedings of the last conference have recently been published by Ashgate. A suggestion is being worked on for a 2008 conference on why ‘early musicians’ performed in a different way from how ‘conventional’ musicians perform the same music and the extent to which the differences are backed by historical sources.

An annual Nema Day takes place in November, with a practical workshop directed by a leading performer, the Margot Leigh Milner Lecture, named after a driving force in the foundation of Nema, and a concert given either by participants in the workshop, or a young professional group. While in the past Nema Days were held in London, the highly successful 2003 event took place in Cambridge, hosted by the Eastern Early Music Forum

The 2004 day was hosted by the Midlands Early Music Forum and included a workshop on South American Baroque Music, led by Jeffrey Skidmore; in 2005 we visited the South West Early Music Forum in Bradford on Avon where Robert Hollingworth ran a workshop on Venetian music, and the 2006 event is planned to take place in Leeds, hosted by the North East Early Music Forum. We will return to the London area in 2007.

See details on the Events page.

  
 

NEMA’s founder president was Dr John Mansfield Thomson, the New Zealand-born writer, editor and musicologist, whose enthusiasm and vision for early music also led to the foundation of the magazine Early Music which he edited until his return to New Zealand in 1983. John Thomson died in 1999.

 
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