Early Music Revival

In the 1960s, Gustav Leonhardt transformed from locally successful Dutch harpsichordist into a global phenomenon.  Ironically Leonhardt, an advocate for historical performance and building preservation, achieved critical and commercial success during an era marked by rhetoric of social protest, renewal, and technological progress. 
An analysis of Leonhardt’s American reception reveals paradoxes of taste, aesthetics and political engagement.  Record company advertisements, interviews and other materials promoted Leonhardt not only as a virtuoso performer-conductor, but also as a serious and scholarly persona. Leonhardt’s recordings demonstrate an “authenticist” stance, contrasting with the Romantic subjectivity of earlier Bach interpreters and the flamboyant showmanship of competing harpsichordists.  Complementing this positioning were Leonhardt’s austere performances in Straub-Huillet’s film Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, his advocacy for historical instruments, and his uncompromising repertoire choices.  Associations with the Fulbright program and prestigious American universities further strengthened his reputation as a scholar-performer.
To a conservative older generation, Leonhardt represented sobriety and a link to the past.  Nonetheless, Leonhardt’s staid persona had broader appeal:  an unlikely ‘guru,’ he attracted flocks of devotees.  Younger musicians, inspired by Leonhardt’s speech-like harpsichord articulation and use of reduced performing forces, viewed his performances as anti-mainstream protest music—despite Leonhardt’s own self-consciously apolitical stance.  Moreover, the antiquity of the harpsichord and historical instruments complemented concurrent interests in craftsmanship, whole foods and authenticity; yet early music’s popularity was dependent upon technological mediation, especially high fidelity recordings.  Leonhardt thus emerges as a complex figure whose appeal transcended generational boundaries and bridged technological mediums.

This chapter offers fresh theoretical perspectives for understanding music revival as concept, cultural process, and medium of change. Upon reviewing existing revival scholarship and contextualizing it within nineteenth and twentieth-century intellectual history, the authors identify new territories (social, political, geographical, and ontological) that are ripe for critical examination through the revival lens. The chapter’s key arguments are advanced via a set of six inter-related themes: (1) activism and the desire for change; (2) the valuation and reinterpretation of history; (3) recontextualization and transformation; (4) legitimacy and authenticity; (5) musical transmission and dissemination; and (6) post-revival outgrowths and ramifications. Viewing the project of reclaiming, reimagining, and transforming the past as a recurring universal phenomenon and revealing the extent to which the legacy of revivalist visions continues to shape our musical and social worlds, the authors argue for the potential of revival as a productive analytical tool in contemporary, global contexts.