“Early music” is a practical umbrella term generally used for historical European repertoires from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, often including much of the eighteenth century. Its boundaries are flexible, however, and the name identifies a recognised field of study and performance rather than a single style or precisely defined historical period.

In reality, there is no single “early-music sound.” Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music emerged from very different languages, instruments, tuning systems, performance spaces and social worlds. The term is therefore most useful when it leads us towards greater specificity: which period, place, repertoire, instruments and performance practices are we actually exploring?

The Early Music revival began taking shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became an increasingly professional and international movement after the Second World War. Although it initially concentrated mainly on music written before the nineteenth century, its methods and questions gradually expanded into Classical, Romantic and even twentieth-century repertoire.

This expansion also revealed that so-called mainstream performance traditions are themselves historical and changeable: the way nineteenth-century music is played today is not necessarily the way it was played during the nineteenth century.

Early music is not about pretending that we can recreate the past exactly. It is about approaching historical music with curiosity about the sound world and circumstances for which it was written—and allowing that knowledge to enrich a living performance in the present.

Historically informed performance means approaching a piece with curiosity about the musical world in which it was created. We investigate original sources, historical instruments, treatises, notation, tuning systems, pronunciation, articulation, ornamentation, performance spaces and the conventions that performers and listeners may once have shared.

I often compare it to learning a language. When we learn its pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and cultural references, we don’t do so in order to repeat old sentences mechanically. We do it so that we can understand more deeply, communicate more clearly and eventually speak with greater freedom. In the same way, historical knowledge can expand a performer’s imagination and range of choices.

This does not mean claiming to recreate an “authentic” performance. We cannot reproduce the original musicians, audiences, social circumstances or ways of listening, and the surviving evidence is always incomplete. Historical performers themselves also adapted works to the musicians, instruments, spaces and occasions available to them. Every performance therefore requires interpretation, judgement and creativity—and every performance inevitably belongs to the present.

Tradition can be valuable, but it is not static. Ways of playing pass from one generation to another and gradually change, often without anyone consciously deciding that they should. Early recordings show that musicians around 1900 sometimes performed nineteenth-century music very differently from the way it was taught later. What feels “traditional” today may therefore be a relatively recent convention rather than an uninterrupted connection with the composer’s world.

Historically informed performance helps us become aware of these layers. It allows us to distinguish between historical evidence, inherited habits and our own artistic decisions—not so that we must reject tradition, but so that our choices become more conscious.

Above all, it encourages us to ask better questions. Why was this music written in this particular way? What possibilities and limitations did its instruments offer? What did the notation specify, and what did it leave to performers? How did language, rhetoric, dance, tuning, acoustics or social context shape the music?

This kind of curiosity need not stop with Medieval, Renaissance or Baroque repertoire. We can ask the same questions about Classical, Romantic and twentieth-century music, studying original editions, instruments and documents—and, for more recent repertoire, listening to recordings made during a composer’s lifetime.

Historically informed performance is ultimately not about returning to the past. It is about listening more carefully to the distance between their world and ours, and using that knowledge to create a living, meaningful performance in the present.

ou don’t need to know everything before you begin, but curiosity is essential. Early-music notation often tells us far less than a modern score: dynamics, articulation, instrumentation, ornamentation, tempo and even accidentals may be absent or only partly indicated. To interpret the music well, we need to learn about the conventions that performers of the time would have understood without needing to see them written down.

A good starting point is to look for an original source in facsimile. IMSLP often provides scans of manuscripts, early printed editions and later historical editions alongside modern scores, so always check the description of the file you are opening.

If you want to investigate more deeply, RISM—the International Inventory of Musical Sources—can help you discover which manuscripts and printed sources survive and where they are held. Some RISM records link directly to digitised copies; in other cases, they lead you to the library or archive that owns the source. From there, you may be able to consult the institution’s own digital collection.

Always ask what kind of document you are looking at: an original manuscript, an early print, a facsimile, a later historical edition, a diplomatic transcription or a modern editorial edition.

For beginners, a clear modern edition may be the most practical place to start. However, it is valuable to compare it with the original whenever possible. Editorial choices—such as added bar lines, modernised clefs, shortened note values, suggested accidentals, dynamics or articulations—can make a score easier to read while also shaping the way we understand the music.

The aim is definitely not to delay playing until you have completed all the research. Playing, listening and reading should inform one another: play the music, notice which questions arise, consult a source or treatise, experiment, and return to the piece with new ears.

You can read more in my article on reading early-music scores and facsimiles, choosing instruments and understanding historical tuning systems.

Absolutely. Early music includes a great deal of repertoire that beginners can approach meaningfully, especially music with clear phrasing, dance-like rhythm, repeated patterns or transparent textures. The key is to choose pieces that suit the player’s technical level without flattening their musical character.

It is also an excellent foundation for later repertoire. Many elements that continue to shape Western music—counterpoint, harmony, cadences, dance rhythms, phrasing, ornamentation and the relationship between text and music—can be explored very clearly in early music. It teaches us to listen horizontally as well as vertically: to follow individual lines, understand how they interact and hear how a musical structure is built.

For recorder players, early music is the instrument’s original repertoire. Most beginners play a modern copy of a Baroque recorder, but they can also explore Renaissance music, particularly in ensembles, where it develops listening, blending, phrasing and awareness of the other voices. Historical Renaissance recorders have a different construction, sound and fingering system, so those instruments are usually introduced much later, if at all.

The same principle applies to singers and other instrumentalists: you do not need to master every historical convention before beginning, but it helps to understand that the score is often only a starting point. French Baroque music, for example, may look relatively simple while expecting a rich ornamental language; Renaissance music may invite diminutions, musica ficta and other choices that are not fully written down.

Beginners can introduce these elements gradually. Early music can therefore be both accessible and profound: simple enough to begin with, but rich enough to keep revealing new layers throughout a lifetime.

In many styles of Early Music, ornaments are not simply decorative additions—they are part of the musical language itself. One way to understand this is to think about what a score is actually trying to communicate.

Modern scores (especially from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) often function as performance scores: they tell performers in great detail what to do through dynamics, articulation, tempo and expression marks. Earlier scores are often closer to skeleton scores. They provide the musical framework, but they expect performers to complete part of the music in performance through articulation, ornamentation, rhythmic flexibility and other stylistic conventions that did not need to be written down.

That may sound intimidating, but it is actually very liberating. Every historical style developed its own vocabulary, and these “rules” are much easier to learn than many people imagine. In a way, it is similar to jazz: performers are expected to make artistic decisions within a shared musical language. In fact, for much of history, composition and improvisation were not considered separate activities.

Different periods and countries developed different ornamental traditions. Renaissance musicians enriched longer notes with diminutions—flowing melodic bridges connecting one important note to the next. I’ve written a practical guide to Renaissance diminutions here.

In French Baroque music, performers used a refined vocabulary of agréments (literally “additions”): ornaments attached to individual notes such as trills, mordents and appoggiaturas. Italian, English and German Baroque music often invites longer, more flowing ornaments based on scales and arpeggios. Many of these ideas grew naturally from the diminution practices of the Renaissance, although they developed into distinct Baroque styles.

Like learning the pronunciation of a language, ornamentation develops gradually. You don’t need to master every ornament from the beginning. In Baroque music, for example, many players begin by learning a good trill before gradually expanding their vocabulary.

Don’t think of ornaments as decorations added to the music. Think of them as part of the music’s pronunciation. They are part of the way it breathes, speaks and moves.

There is no single “Early Music sound.” A medieval chant, a Renaissance motet, a French Baroque suite and an Italian sonata belong to very different musical worlds. Even within the same period, music probably sounded different from one city, one church or one ensemble to another.

We can never know exactly how this music sounded. We do not know precisely how people used their voices, how every instrument was played, or how every performance unfolded. But that does not mean we know nothing. Historical instruments, original notation, treatises, letters, paintings, performance spaces and many other sources allow us to build an increasingly rich picture of the musical world in which this repertoire lived. Rather than searching for one “correct” sound, we try to understand the musical language and the world in which it was created. The more questions we ask, the richer that picture becomes.

The instruments themselves have many stories to tell. Their range, tuning, resistance, resonance and tonal colours reveal what composers expected to hear and what performers found natural or expressive. Historical temperaments and acoustics also shaped the music: intervals, keys and harmonies did not all have the same colour, and music written for a church, a palace chamber or an outdoor celebration responded differently to the space around it.

Musical thinking also changed over the centuries. Renaissance music often grows out of polyphonic vocal writing, where independent melodic lines interact like voices in conversation. Baroque music, while still deeply connected to singing, places greater emphasis on rhetoric, gesture, dance and harmony. Articulation becomes part of musical speech, shaping the way phrases breathe, persuade and move.

Notation is another important clue. Earlier scores often leave more responsibility to the performer. Articulation, ornamentation, instrumentation, accidentals and rhythmic flexibility were frequently understood rather than written down. Reading older notation can seem daunting at first, but once you become familiar with it, you begin to notice details that modern editions sometimes hide. Learning to read original notation is a little like deciphering a fascinating puzzle: every step brings you closer to the composer’s way of thinking.

Learning Early Music therefore involves much more than copying a particular sound. It means asking questions, comparing sources, listening widely, experimenting and gradually discovering why the music was written the way it was.

We will never become sixteenth- or eighteenth-century musicians, nor should we try to. We are musicians of our own time. The aim is not to recreate the past, but to understand its musical language well enough to let it speak vividly in the present.

If you would like to explore these ideas further, you will find practical guides and historical articles throughout my article page.