What is the state of early music performance and research today and of Bach in particular?
I hope the issue of the chorus and using one singer per part has been settled. At least I think it has been for most Bach scholars. It is clearly right for Bach, and for Telemann too. It’s a practice that is mainstream today for most period performers. Also, performing early music on period instruments is now the norm. At the UW, we don’t have a major in early music. We’ve had inquiries, but don’t offer it. But we have students playing period instruments – especially harpsichord and baroque flute – on a very professional level. Is there new and major information about Bach (below) the general public should know about? Occasionally a new small piece turns up, usually by accident or from a source we didn’t know about. Music that had been lost in World War II, for example, turns out to have been taken from Berlin and then stored in Kiev. But it has been returned to Berlin, and that has added a lot. Some interesting discoveries have been made since that music resurfaced in the late 1990s.
