How early is early?

The demise of the magazine Early Music Today (it will henceforward be published as part of Rhinegold’s Classical Music) begs the question once again: what is the contemporary need for the term ‘Early Music’? Recently the music which has fallen within the ‘early’ bracket has been so late (Brahms, Strauss, even Stravinsky) that my grandmother could have attended the first performances, and possibly did. The original banner of ‘authentic performances on original instruments’ is so taken for granted these days that it no longer seems necessary to give the repertoires in question a justifying name. Everyone now expects orchestral music written before the 19th century to be played on instruments of the period; whereas with music written after 1800 I get the impression no one particularly cares. A Brahms symphony played on original instruments today certainly doesn’t shock as a Mozart symphony played on original instruments did 30 years ago. Then the new sounds on display — rudely challenging long decades of accepted practice by our symphony orchestras — had a revolutionary fervour to them, along with the nut cutlets, Laura Ashley frocks and the sandals allegedly favoured by the movement’s foot soldiers. Now the heat has gone out of the Early Music movement.

It is not quite dead. There are still magazines dedicated to the concept, and also some important festivals. Of the latter those in Utrecht, York and Boston do very well in taking advantage of the width of the net that the term now encompasses. It has been a feature of the scene that, as the need for the specialist term ‘early music’ has waned, the York Early Music Festival has become one of the UK’s most prominent events, backed up by the National Centre for Early Music. The appeal of these festivals is that they can focus on the earlier repertoires, which are now of interest to everybody thanks to the pioneering work of the early-music movement. Unfortunately, this is of no use to the specialist magazines. It turns out that the secondary stage of early musicdom is to be able to enjoy the fruits of all those heated arguments about Pythagorean tuning, baroque bowing practices and the correct pronunciation of medieval Latin in Germany in the concert hall, while fewer and fewer people want to read about them.

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