Early music revival

The movement to study and perform music from earlier periods using historical sources, instruments, and performance practices. Its modern forms combine scholarship with choices about how historical evidence should shape performance.

Historically informed performance: An approach to performance that uses historical evidence to guide musical choices. It names the revival’s central method: using research to shape performance.
Arnold Dolmetsch: A French-born musician and instrument maker who helped establish the modern early music revival. His instrument making and performances helped turn historical study into a concert movement.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt: An Austrian cellist and conductor who became a leading figure in historically informed performance. His work challenged modern orchestral assumptions about Baroque music.
Authenticity (music): The contested idea that a performance can represent a work’s original or historically appropriate sound. The revival’s claims have often been evaluated through competing ideas of authenticity.
Period instrument: An instrument of a historical type, or a modern reconstruction of one. Such instruments can change the sound and technique of earlier repertory.
Wanda Landowska: A Polish harpsichordist and teacher who helped revive the harpsichord in modern concert life. Her performances and advocacy made an early keyboard instrument prominent again.
Gustav Leonhardt: A Dutch harpsichordist, conductor, and scholar central to the modern revival of early music. His performances and recordings helped define historically informed Bach interpretation.
Modern performance practice: The conventions and instruments commonly used in contemporary classical performance. It provides the main reference point against which historical methods are contrasted.
Historical tuning: The study and use of tuning systems and pitch standards from earlier periods. Tuning choices affect the intervals and sonorities heard in historical repertory.
David Munrow: A British musician and broadcaster known for performances and recordings of medieval and Renaissance music. His broadcasts brought early repertories and historical instruments to broad audiences.

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