EDITORIAL

Abstract

As is now generally agreed, so-called ‘authentic’ performances of baroque music are modern in conception and sound. The point was argued convincingly during the 1980s by Laurence Dreyfus, Richard Taruskin and others (Dreyfus, ‘Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century’, The Musical Quarterly 69/3 (1983), 297–322; Taruskin, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Nicholas Temperley and Robert Winter, ‘The Limits of Authenticity: A Discussion’, Early Music 12/1 (1984), 3–25; Nicholas Kenyon, ed., Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)). Radically separated from nineteenth-century performance traditions, the reconstructed ‘old’ sound was exciting and new, and, for me at least, there have been occasions when these ‘authentic’ performances have been revelatory, shedding light on music I thought I knew (although, to be fully confessional in terms of the era in which it all began, I also loved the Swingle Singers and Wendy (Walter) Carlos's Switched-On Bach).