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Francis Knights, Revisiting The future of early music in Britain, Early Music, Volume 41, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 11–15, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cat013
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Extract
By the mid-1970s the early music revival was in full swing in Britain; radical, new and exciting, it promised a shot in the arm for a post-war music profession that seemed all too ‘establishment’ and predictable. The leading practitioners were coming to the fore, new groups were being founded by the day, and the first home-grown British recordings and broadcasts were spreading the ‘new’ sound of early music to an ever-widening audience. The fact that a vocal and reactionary Old Guard among the critics disapproved only made it more appealing. However, it was time for some strategic thinking about the way the movement should develop, and on 14–16 May 1977 a conference called simply ‘The future of early music in Britain’ was held in the Waterloo Room of the Royal Festival Hall, London. The Arts Council and the Gulbenkian Foundation provided financial support, and the conference chair was Howard Mayer Brown. More than 180 delegates represented every conceivable aspect of the profession: performers, scholars, instrument-makers, publishers, libraries, festivals, broadcasters, societies, retailers, journals, record companies, concert agencies, museums, archives and schools. The full list, printed in the back of the modest proceedings volume edited by John Thomson and published by Oxford University Press in 1978 (illus.1),1 reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of British early music, and it is a pleasure to report that three-and-a-half decades on so many of these names are still with us, and active. As well as the talks heard during the two main days (16 of which appear in the 72-page proceedings), there were exhibitions by the Early Music Centre, Brian Jordan and the London College of Furniture’s Department of Instrument Technology, and performances from the English Concert and the Extempore String Ensemble. The idea that this conference marked some kind of turning point was apparent to many of the speakers, and Thomson’s introduction noted that it ‘will stand as historical evidence of views held at a certain time and place and as a nodal point in a continuing dialogue and discussion’.2
