The Early Music Legend

  Ref  Semibrevity British Library Search Google Scholar on David Munrow

The following comes from  this link  The protagonists of the Early Music Revival David John Munrow (Aug. 12 1942 - May 15 1976) did more than anyone else in the second half of the last century to popularise early music in Great Britain, despite a career lasting barely ten years. Munrow has even be regarded as the "inventor" of early music as a new movement per se. Of course, there were other musicians ploughing the same field. But it was David Munrow who helped to popularise it like no other in the 20th century. David Munrow left behind him not only his recordings, but a large collection of musical instruments. Munrow's research into instruments and music of the past led to specially commissioned careful  reconstructions otherwise unobtainable antiquities from such instrumental families as the cornett, rackett, kortholt from makers such as Otto Steinkopf, Christopher Monk and Jonathan Askey. Munrow and his future wife Gillian Reid began giving workshops and recitals on ...

If we li ve in another country we are likely to see life from a different angle. Sometimes the experience brings special insights into behaviour and all the arts that will throw fresh light on the patterns of human development as happened to Darwin, the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, collectors of flora and fauna and even to collectors of folk song. When Maud Karpeles and Cecil Sharp explored the isolated mountain area of the Appalachians in America they discovered a source of folk song that had closer parallels with the England, Ireland and Scotland of the seventeenth-century than with the twentieth. This was their richest find. On another level, when the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss left France to take up the chair of sociology in the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil he came into contact with the Indian population of the interior. The direction of his life changed. He began to study primitive culture, especially their modes of thought and behaviour and was able to use these i...

  Guest Blogger: Peter Dickinson   is a composer, writer and pianist and an Emeritus Professor of two universities – Keele and London. See   here   for more details. ‘My wife and I first met David and Gill Munrow in Cambridge in about 1965. It was summer and we were all in the garden at 54 Bateman Street, the home of Mary Potts, whose late husband was L. J. Potts, the literary critic and English don at Queens’ College. Mary Potts had a very special role in the early music revival which has not been acknowledged [other than in this  Semibrevity blog post ]. A mere mention of her more distinguished pupils, who included  Christopher Hogwood , Colin Tilney and Peter Williams, is enough to indicate that she ought to be better known now. She knew harpsichordists of international reputation such as Gustav Leonhardt, Raphael Puyana and Kenneth Gilbert. Her own performances were on a more modest scale but she played in and around Cambridge for over fifty years. At M...