florida state university college of music performance practice

y the recording industry. With the advent of the compact disc, record companies
realized that they could reproduce recordings at a much cheaper cost than ever before.
The growth in early music provided a niche in which newer recordings of early music
repertoire could be marketed as the “authentic version” or the “true version” of a
particular work. These claims were then broadcast and channeled through many music
critics who publicly gave favorable reviews to those entities who aspired to be as
“authentic” and “true” as possible to the original performance of early music.
The latter part of the twentieth century observed an institulization of early music
in which early music that used to exist in the periphery now was regarded as mainstream.
This accomplishment was achieved because a pedagogical shift occurred in educational
institutions worldwide and particularly in North America. Early music as a neophyte
venture was taught and transmitted in a unique and specialized way, with only those who
desired to learn to play or sing in period style would go to a handful of places in the
world and learn in an apprentice style manner. Over time, as early music grew,
specialization changed to teaching convergence. In other words, educational institutions
recognized that the most marketable vocalists or instrumentalists would be skilled in
performing in both period and modern style. As a result, musicians were being taught
simultaneously to perform in both styles. This placed early music in the mainstream but
not without consequences. The same higher institutions who taught convergence also
bred conservative uniformity. This standardization of early music performance stifled
that which was the essence of early music, improvisation.
The increased rhetoric and exclusivity of those claiming “authenticity” and “being
true to the work” set the stage for several writers in the late 1980s to resist and revolt
against such claims. During the middle of the twentieth century there were a “few voices
in the wilderness” who were skeptical of such assertions; Richard Taruskin became the
chief critic with his notorious essays that took to task what he viewed as bogus claims of
the early music movement. In his writings Taruskin contends that the Early Music
Movement with their notorious aspirations for “authenticity” and being “true to the work”
in actuality has little to do with historical correctness and all to do with reflecting
contemporary objectivist values. Further, he exposes that historical correctness is more
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