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Trevor Pinnock, Reflections of a ‘pioneer’, Early Music, Volume 41, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 17–21, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas162
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Quite where I got my love of early music (the sound, not the journal) is hard to say. I remember the excitement of discovering a piece by John Blow at the age of seven and proudly learning it for my next lesson. My favourite music, apart from ‘The Jolly Miller’, whose composer I never noted, was arrangements of tunes by Bach, each one prefaced by a little story. Some years later Schirmer’s anthology of early keyboard music became my treasure trove. Then, when I was about 15, I discovered a harpsichord in a local music shop and was entranced by its sound. After another two years I took my first lessons with Nicholas Jackson, a pupil of Gustav Leonhardt, who had a splendid antique Kirckman harpsichord as well as a Goble with seven pedals, one of the best modern harpsichords available at the time.
Today one could imagine that early music performance arrived fully formed on original instruments in the god-like hands of Leonhardt, Harnoncourt and others, who spearheaded the historical revival a few years before my contemporaries and I joined it. In fact, in the mid- to late 1960s, modern instruments were commonly used by all of us. In their fine recording of Telemann’s Paris Quartets Leonhardt played an unhistorical Neupert harpsichord and Frans Brüggen, Jaap Schröder and Anner Bylsma all played on modern instruments. Brüggen and Leonhardt also appeared as concerto soloists with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. This was a thrilling and memorable experience for me, only surpassed by the unexpected opportunity to accompany Brüggen playing his modern-pitch recorder in a whole sonata movement during his London masterclass. On this occasion I was introduced to John Thomson, Walter Bergmann and other stalwarts of the recorder-playing community.
