The Early Music Legend

A Treasury of Early Music  http://youtube.com/Searle8 9 March 1971/ The Guardian.     Meirion Bowen on the scholar, virtuosic musician and crumhorn whizzkid at the forefront of the period-instrument movement, who died tragically young 40 years ago                       David Munrow, May 1968. Photograph: Tony McGrath for the Observer I recall first seeing David Munrow at a vicarage tea-party in Cambridge in 1962. He was playing the bassoon. The occasion was not without moments of stress, for Munrow’s fellow-musicians kept turning over two pages at once, or got confused over repeats in a Telemann sonata. Munrow puffed on undaunted. He revealed, rather, a wicked relish for some of the unexpectedly jarring discords that cropped up. It was hard to keep a straight face. If anyone had prophesied then that he would have future co...

     Brian Kay The Guardian, Friday 25 April 2008 Article history It is said that if you can remember the swinging 60s, then you weren't there. But I can clearly recall the three memorable years I spent studying for a degree in music and singing as a Choral Scholar in the choir of King's College, Cambridge, four decades ago. It was a wonderful time and place to be developing a passionate interest in music: my fellow students included would-be conductors John Eliot Gardiner, Andrew Davis and David Atherton, early-music pioneers David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood, a young man already making waves as a composer called John Rutter, and six of us who went on to become the King's Singers. The Choral Scholars at King's had inherited from previous generations a flourishing library of close harmony arrangements: light-hearted cover versions of well-known pop songs, folk and show songs, glees and madrigals. We used these as an escape from the serious business of dail...

30 years ago the York Early Music Festival radically changed the way period music was performed and it remains the leading festival of its kind. Ref The Guardian Music Blog..... The summer of 1977 saw a musical revolution. A bunch of young players, bored with the mainstream, ripped up the rulebook and stripped everything back to basics, playing home-made instruments which were often out of tune. The DIY ethos meant anyone capable of strumming a few chords could join in. It was also the summer of punk. The York Early Music Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary this year: and though it now shares the scene with similar festivals in London and Brighton, it was the first of its kind in Britain and remains at the vanguard of period music performance. We now take "authentic" performance so much for granted that it is hard to appreciate just how much of a radical, cult interest pre-18th century music was when the York Festival was founded in a one-bedroom flat within s...