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W<\/span>ith some disbelief, I realise that it\u2019s half a century since I attended my first early-music concert \u2013 at the 1972 BBC Proms. It was a thrilling night, because the sounds conjured up by that virtuosic pioneer David Munrow and his Early Music Consort of London were so new, so challenging, so revolutionary. <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n So was the music, even though it had been composed four or five centuries earlier. Who then had heard of Hermann Finck, Jacobus Barbireau or Hans Kotter? Come to think of it, who has heard of them now? Munrow, who died tragically and much too early, had a knack for digging out complete rarities from the Medieval and Renaissance eras and bringing them to life so flamboyantly that you felt as if you had been transported to the Field of the Cloth of Gold itself.<\/span><\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t alone. The early 1970s were full of brilliant young musicians determined to overthrow anachronistic, Romanticised approaches to old music, and do so with panache. In that same Proms season, John Eliot Gardiner conducted Monteverdi\u2019s Vespers in Westminster Cathedral, and even over the radio the lean, incisive singing and playing sounded as daring as Stockhausen or Birtwistle. Nikolaus Harnoncourt\u2019s provocative recordings of German and French Baroque music <\/span>horrified some but delighted many more.<\/span><\/p>\n And when Christopher Hogwood<\/a> <\/strong>(top image) brought out his legendary recording of Handel\u2019s Messiah <\/i><\/a><\/strong>a few years later \u2013 period instruments, boy trebles, lightning speeds and, most mesmerising of all, Emma Kirkby\u2019s laser-like voice soaring through the soprano solos \u2013 it was as if someone had put a bomb under <\/span>the 200-year-old tradition of performing <\/span>Handel\u2019s choral works with massive forces. Of course, with hindsight we may feel that the performances created by Hogwood or Harnoncourt said more about late-20th-century sensibilities than about how music actually sounded in the 1700s. That didn\u2019t matter at the <\/span>time. They were different. They shocked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There are some things that I don\u2019t miss <\/span>about those early years of the early-music <\/span>movement. One is the fierce polarity between various camps. It wasn\u2019t just that period-instrument players asserted that theirs was the \u2018authentic\u2019 and only true way to perform Baroque music (a claim nobody is foolish enough to make any more). Or that, on the other side, <\/span>players in symphony orchestras regularly <\/span>caricatured period-instrumentalists as failed musicians who couldn\u2019t play in tune. There were also bitter rivalries within the early-music movement itself.<\/span><\/p>\n It was quite fun for a journalist if a leading scholar-performer spent a whole interview telling you why a rival\u2019s version of (to take one infamous example) Bach\u2019s Mass in B minor was misconceived in every possible way. But I\u2019m not sure it was good for those working in the field if they were constantly made to feel like participants in a latter-day Hundred Years War. It wasn\u2019t until the 1990s or even later that a new, more flexibly minded generation of musicians appeared, enabling symphony orchestras to do passable impressions of \u2018historically informed\u2019 performances where required and, on the other side, period-instrument bands to bring back some of the lusher expressive devices ruthlessly ditched by their dogmatic forerunners.<\/span><\/p>\n Two things, however, I miss a lot. One is Medieval music. It\u2019s not that nobody performs pre-Renaissance dances or vocal music any more, but Munrow managed to bring it into the mainstream of concert life and attract a big following. Nobody does that now. People pay lip-service to the concept of \u2018nine centuries of classical music\u2019, but in reality few groups perform anything before Tallis, and most early-instrument concerts are of 18th-and 19th-century music. In other words, the mainstream repertoire has shrunk back to what it was before period instruments came along.<\/span><\/p>\n The other thing I miss is the thirst for rediscovery and scholarship that infused so many early-music pioneers. How many of today\u2019s ensemble leaders go back to primary sources \u2013 composers\u2019 manuscripts or vivid accounts of social and cultural conditions in earlier <\/span>centuries \u2013 to enrich their understanding <\/span>of the music? How many are prepared to spend days, maybe months, rooting around in dusty libraries to find music that deserves resuscitation?<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t deny that the technical standards of today\u2019s musicians are, on the whole, streets ahead of what I heard in the 1970s. But I miss today the feeling of new worlds being revealed and old preconceptions challenged. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s just nostalgia talking.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Top image shows<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n By Richard Morrison Published: Friday, 25 March 2022 at 12:00 am With some disbelief, I realise that it\u2019s half a century since I attended my first early-music concert \u2013 at the 1972 BBC Proms. It was a thrilling night, because the sounds conjured up by that virtuosic pioneer David Munrow and his Early Music Consort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":13367,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/03\/why-the-early-music-revolution-of-the-1970s-was-truly-a-moment-to-savour.jpg",1159,983,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/03\/why-the-early-music-revolution-of-the-1970s-was-truly-a-moment-to-savour-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/03\/why-the-early-music-revolution-of-the-1970s-was-truly-a-moment-to-savour-300x254.jpg",300,254,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/03\/why-the-early-music-revolution-of-the-1970s-was-truly-a-moment-to-savour-768x651.jpg",768,651,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/03\/why-the-early-music-revolution-of-the-1970s-was-truly-a-moment-to-savour-1024x869.jpg",800,679,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/03\/why-the-early-music-revolution-of-the-1970s-was-truly-a-moment-to-savour.jpg",1159,983,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/03\/why-the-early-music-revolution-of-the-1970s-was-truly-a-moment-to-savour.jpg",1159,983,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Richard Morrison Published: Friday, 25 March 2022 at 12:00 am With some disbelief, I realise that it\u2019s half a century since I attended my first early-music concert \u2013 at the 1972 BBC Proms. It was a thrilling night, because the sounds conjured up by that virtuosic pioneer David Munrow and his Early Music Consort…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/13366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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