Well-tempered woodwinds

Abstract

For the early music movement this is a decade infused with self-reflection. It is over 40 years since the boom of the early 1970s, and many pioneering performers are celebrating long careers that started in small counter-cultural settings and have led to mainstream concert success and global record sales. So it is only natural that we might be interested in how we got where we are, as well as asking where we are going next. As a contribution to early music nostalgia, this book is much more than a simple biography of Friedrich von Huene, one of the world’s leading historical woodwind-makers; it also investigates his research and influence upon performance. Through this prism it offers both a cultural history of the early music movement in America and its connections to European practice, and a history of modern recorder playing. Bridging two continents and several phases of the early music revival, the narrative is peppered with insightful vignettes exploring key 20th-century recorder virtuosos, each biographical strand encapsulating some aspect of influence between makers and the musicians who discovered the limits of their new instruments, and how this in turn prompted changes in taste and advances of style. In Friedrich von Huene, several important talents came together: performance, craftsmanship, research and the ability to combine all three. It is therefore wonderfully appropriate that this book was written by another scholar/performer, Geoffrey Burgess, an authority on historic oboes. His sense of balance brings clarity without simplification and cleverly combines technical detail with social history.