The End of Ancient Music

Bruce Haynes (1940-2011) made a career as an oboist in a classical orchestra and was interested in the history of performance practice and his instrument from a young age (in the late 1960s, he opened a workshop in California where replicas of baroque oboes were made under his guidance). The experience he accumulated performing on modern and historical instruments, concerts and recordings with famous musicians and ensembles, interactions with musicologists formed the basis of this book, in which Haynes explains how codified musical notation and the dissemination of musical works on paper gradually cleared 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 without being able to fully subjugate it. Thus, the historical end of ancient music turned out to be the condition of its beginning, a new birth to which the author of this book was also a part.