The End of Ancient Music

Bruce Haynes (1940-2011) built a career as an oboist in a classical orchestra and, since his youth, was interested in the history of performance practice and his instrument (in the late 1960s, he opened a workshop in California where replicas... of baroque oboes were made under his guidance). His accumulated experience performing on modern and historical instruments, concerts and recordings with renowned musicians and ensembles, and communication with musicologists formed the basis of this book, in which Haynes describes how the codified notation and dissemination of musical works on paper gradually cleansed Western music of variability and made it "academic"—and how, later in the last half-century, academic musicians discovered a whole universe behind the strict facade of their discipline, from which this discipline grew, unable to fully subordinate it. Thus, the historical end of ancient music turned out to be a condition for its beginning, a new birth, to which the author of this book was also a part.