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A music performance can try both to reconstruct early practice and to give pleasure or dramatic effect. The results can be surprisingly vital, but the tension between the goals may explain part of why the early music movement has, as Joseph Kerman says, “always flourished in an atmosphere of multiple controversy”. This book presents insiders’ views of many of the controversies—what they are about, and why they might matter. Without such views, we cannot really understand why these artists play as they do. Some of the controversies arise within the realm of musicology, but others reflect the tension between scholarship and art. The crux of this book can be expressed in a question: How can you use historical information to enliven modern performance? Answers to that question fall on a spectrum from ignoring the evidence to following it to the letter. Those two responses, and others less extreme, underlie the most obvious of the controversies—what Kerman called “disputes over turf”.

Conventional wisdom holds that during the Renaissance period, instrumental music was a sideshow. Vocal music, such as that discussed by Peter Phillips and Paul Hillier, had such prestige that only after 1600 did instrumental repertory come into its own. But according to the harpist-keyboardist Andrew Lawrence-King, conventional wisdom is wrong. It became the conventional view anyway, he argues, partly because of the modern preoccupation with written scores. In Renaissance instrumental music, much of what was important was not written down but was improvised. This raises, he points out, a paradox at the heart of the early music movement: to be faithful to the spirit of the past often means being unfaithful to the written notes that survive from the past. This chapter presents an interview with Lawrence-King on improvisation in Renaissance instrumental music and perfect instruments.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of Dutch musicians created one of the world centers of what we now call the early music movement. Through the work of the Kuijken brothers, the recorder virtuoso Frans Brueggen, as well as Gustav Leonhardt and Anner Bylsma, the Netherlands became to Baroque performance what Switzerland is to chocolate, watches, and banks. Just as young musicians had long flocked to the Schola Cantorum in Basel for instruction, they now came from all over the world to Amsterdam. Leonhardt and his associates raised their instrumental technique to new heights. More significantly, they developed a new approach to playing Baroque music. In contrast to the motor-like “sewing machine” style prevalent in preceding decades, these players emphasized the metrical hierarchy that John Butt explains in the last chapter; and their playing, says Laurence Dreyfus, sounded “strikingly speech-like by mimicking ever-shifting patterns of thought”. This chapter presents an interview with Gustav Leonhardt on the use of keyboard instruments in Baroque music, early fingerings, and registration. He also discusses the interchangeability of harpsichord, clavichord, and portative organ.

The performance history of Dido and Aeneas from 1950 can be divided into three distinct periods. The first (1951–80) concentrated on the establishment of an accurate score based on the earliest sources and was defined by two major performances in London in 1951. The second (1980–95), coincident with the growth of the early music movement, focused on a transition to historical instruments, performance practices, and vocal techniques and to smaller forces; it is represented by an abundance of audio recordings. The third period (1995–2016) is defined by scholarly and theatrical interpretations of Dido and Aeneas that consider issues of gender, race, sexuality, and colonialism. An array of recordings, videos, and scholarly writings demarcate this postmodern period of interpretation. Each of these periods is discussed in turn.