The Early Music Movement

From the 1950s to the 1970s, copied instruments and scholarship brought old sound back into the concert hall.

Related

BaroqueHarpsichord

Once players began looking for evidence about bowing, pitch and instrument size, the concert standard stopped being simply what sounded good.

Time and place

Vienna, Amsterdam and London, 1953 to the 1970s. Harnoncourt founded the Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953, Leonhardt taught harpsichord in Amsterdam, and David Munrow formed the Early Music Consort in London in 1967. Early music festivals such as Bruges took shape during the 1960s.

What happened

This generation copied instruments from evidence, studied bowing, fingering, pitch and ornament, re-edited scores, and relearned how to play valveless brass, gut strings and recorders. They treated Baroque works not as old pieces to be played by a modern orchestra but as music whose conditions of sound had to be rebuilt. In the 1970s early music moved from seminar rooms into recordings and festivals; the recorder entered primary schools, and harpsichords and viols returned to the catalogues.

What changed

The work ceased to be the only object; sound itself became arguable. Players began explaining why they phrased a line or chose a pitch, and liner notes turned into method. Concert programmes changed, with Renaissance and Baroque music moving from opening decoration to whole evenings. Instrument making revived too, and workshops copying old models became a small industry. The argument mattered as much, whether authentic performance is possible and whether the score or the recording carries authority. Since then every classical performer has had to justify choices.

Listen for the turn

Begin with the first movement of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, where the harpsichord cadenza grows into a piece of its own and the movement insists on a plucked historical instrument rather than a piano. Then Telemann's concerto for recorder and flute, where the difference between the two pipes is deliberately preserved. Finally a Monteverdi madrigal, unaccompanied, with ornament left to the singers under the rules of the time. All three show that what kind of sound plays the notes has become part of the work.

Related

This turn belongs to Baroque and connects 聆听的历史, Harpsichord and 巴赫复兴1829.

Sources

• Grove Music Online, entry "Early music" and "Performance practice" — institutions and dates checked, not quoted
• Richard Taruskin, Text and Act (Oxford University Press) — authenticity debate checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.