Technology and its Influence on Early Music Performance

Most early music performers today believe that good intonation and solid rhythm prevailed among musicians who first performed the music. The historical record, however, reveals glaring deficiencies in both areas, except among musicians at the highest level. In fact, a great gulf lay in between a composer’s ability ‘to keep time’ and those who performed their works. Today, the study of early music recordings and steady practice with the metronome have enabled performers of early music to attain prodigious technique. But does this technique get in the way of allowing us to truly hear the music of the past? In an attempt to answer this question, this article examines the rhythmic problems and limitations of eighteenth century instruments, contemporaneous views on virtuosity, and the debates surrounding music versus speech to see how early music performance practice ‘sounded’ and was subsequently heard before the advent of the metronome and sound recordings.