[1] Over the second half of the twentieth century, a movement variously called “early music,” “period performance,” or “historically informed performance” transformed how audiences encounter the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [2] Its practitioners revived obsolete instruments, restored older tunings and playing techniques, and consulted contemporaneous treatises in an effort to recover how such music might have sounded to its first listeners. [3] The movement's early rhetoric leaned heavily on the language of authenticity: a performance was to be judged faithful insofar as it reconstructed the composer's own sonic intentions.
[4] By the 1980s, however, this framing had come under sustained criticism, often from within the movement itself. [5] Skeptics observed that a composer's intentions, even where documents record them, underdetermine the countless choices a performer must make, and that no modern listener, shaped by unfamiliar musical expectations, can hear an old work as its first audience did. [6] The very instruments, restored and re-strung, are not the objects they once were, and the hush of a concert hall differs from the settings for which much of the repertory was conceived. [7] On this account the movement's genuine accomplishment lay not in retrieval but in invention: it had produced a fresh and compelling manner of performance, valuable on its own terms, that happened to draw its materials from the past. [8] Many practitioners came to accept some version of this argument, quietly retiring the word “authentic” in favor of the more guarded “historically informed.” [9] The shift was more than terminological. [10] It conceded that the past sets constraints and offers suggestions but cannot dictate, and that every realization of an old score is unavoidably a modern act of interpretation.
