Early early music

Abstract

The Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, London, holds one of the largest musical instrument collections in the UK, encompassing several thousand instruments. It hosts the Dolmetsch collection and several other historical instrument collections, and was recently further enriched by the permanent loan of keyboard and string instruments from the Victoria and Albert Museum. In recent years, and particularly since the appointment of Mimi Waitzman to the position of deputy-keeper of musical instruments, the Museum has been establishing its position as a centre for diverse activities in early music research, display and performance. Its idyllic surroundings and the proximity of the instruments provided the ideal environment for a three-day conference on 12–14 March 2014 about the early roots of the historically informed performance movement, appropriately entitled Roots of Revival. Pre-conference activities included a tour of the Horniman’s Study Collection Centre in Greenwich, a tour of the Music Gallery in the Museum’s main site, and a book launch event (Networks of music and culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, edited by David Smith and Rachelle Taylor), which, in turn, included a concert of keyboard music played by Peter Dirksen, Hank Knox, David Smith and Rachelle Taylor.