The End of Early Music (book)

The End of Early Music 
A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century
Bruce Haynes
ISBN13: 9780195189872
Jun 2007

Its performing traditions lost to time, early music has become the subject of significant controversy across the world of classical music and presents numerous challenges for musicians, composers, and even listening audiences. The studies of instruments and notes on early manuscript pages may help to restore early music to its intended state, yet the real process is interpretive, taking place within performers themselves.
This book is about historical performance practice in its broadest sense. A veteran of the early music movement and an experienced performer himself, Bruce Haynes begins by identifying the most common performing styles, using and comparing sound recordings from the past. To help musicians distinguish between Period and Romantic styles, he expertly engages with the most current and controversial topics in the field in defining the differences between them. Throughout, he presents many compelling arguments for using pre-Romantic values as inspiration to re-examine and correct Romantic assumptions about performance.
This book also offers a fresh perspective on a broad spectrum of questions about music in history. From Werktreue and the Urtext imperative to formality in ritualized performances and authenticity as an industry standard, Haynes offers straightforward explanations of the most significant questions in the field. Two chapters compare Baroque expression through rhetoric and gestural phrasing to the Romantic concept of autobiography in notes. Throughout his fascinating discussions of descriptive and prescriptive musical notation, the Romantic interpretive conductor in early music, and the controversial practice of composing in Period style, Haynes argues that performances are more pleasing and convincing to contemporary performers and listeners not through the attempt to return to the past, but rather by endeavoring to revive as best we can the styles and techniques that originally produced the music.
Part history, part critical reflection on the state of the authenticity movement, The End of Early Music describes a vision of the future that involves improvisation, rhetorical expression, and composition. This stimulating and compelling book will appeal to musicians and non-musicians alike.
Reviews
"'Early Music' (with its off-putting "scare-quotes") is dead; long live early music! Reading the mature reflections of one of the 'Early Music Movement's' important revolutionaries about the panorama of performing styles in today's musical world is both a pleasure and a challenge. Mr. Haynes's breadth and depth of learning and observation is admirable, but more important is his clear-minded yet passionate formulation of an artistic vision of creative musicianship for our time."--Stephen Stubbs, Northwest Center for Early Music Studies
"From one of the brightest lights in the field of baroque music comes yet another indispensable book. Only Haynes, a performer of great sensitivity and dedication to the 'project' of historical performance, only Haynes, a scholar of alacrity and dynamism, only Haynes, who for over thirty years has never stopped interrogating what we are doing when we approach the past in performance, only Haynes could have written a brilliant book for early music in the new millennium. It is thoughtful, iconoclastic, tender, and honest. This is the new Quantz-obligatory reading for everyone who cares about early music."--Kate van Orden, performer on historical instruments and Professor, University of California, Berkeley
"Haynes has made a series of subtle and important points for all listeners, musicians, all artists and potentially all art in fact, very well.... If you have anything but the most casual interest in music before 1800 and its most proper and effective performance, then this readable and well-argued book, which has a great balance of technical and non-technical illustrations for the practicing musician and listener alike, should not be ignored. Thoroughly recommended."--Mark Sealey, Classical Net
About the Author(s):  Recently retired as a performer, Bruce Haynes worked for many years in Holland. He introduced the hautboy into the Dutch music curriculum, teaching at the Royal Conservatory. Currently, he is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music at the University of Montreal. He has published widely on the history of the oboe and performing pitch standards.
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