A Radio 3 doc that contains some of the best insults I've ever heard

A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the programme on the early music revolution were discussing the backlash they experienced in the 1970s while reviving period-style instruments and techniques. Soprano Dame Emma Kirkby remembered one critic complaining that listening to her performance was ‘as about as interesting as eating an entire meal of plain yoghurt’. Another critic, writing in Gramophone, pronounced the strings of the new ensembles ‘as beautiful as period dentistry’.

Those strings were mostly made of animal guts. There was, as one of the musicians interviewed recalled, ‘a DIY atmosphere’ to the movement, which developed alongside a spate of others in 1973. A fresh interest in medieval and renaissance music and historical treatises had spawned an appetite for ‘authenticity’. Singers turned to the Tudor-centric Clerkes of Oxenford for inspiration. Other musicians were awakened to the folly of making 18th-century music sound like 19th-century music by using metal strings. Their solution was to do away with modern instruments and excessive vibrato and plumb the depths of a more prosaic playbook.

One critic pronounced the strings of the new ensembles ‘as beautiful as period dentistry’

To many professionals, this represented little more than ‘pointless archaeology’, for the results were seldom sparkling. Listening back, one of the members of the newly formed Academy of Ancient Music confessed that their sound was ‘a bit ropey’ but had ‘a certain dash and pizzazz’. To a conservatoire-trained ear it was little more than ‘mouse music’. Imagine the critics’ annoyance when the mouse-musicians scored a Decca LP.

Listening to the interview-rich programme, presented by a jolly yet unobtrusive Sir Nicholas Kenyon, it was clear that we were meant to come away thinking this movement hugely revolutionary. But was it not inevitable that gut-strings would enjoy a renaissance, as fashions changed?