Ancient&modern
When Christopher Hogwood founded the Academy of Ancient Music 50 years ago his focus was firmly on the past, yet together they helped to propel music-making into a new era, as Nicholas Kenyon explains
On 17 September 1973, an intrepid group of orchestral players made their way to All Saints’ Church in Petersham, London, to record Thomas Arne’s Eight Overtures. Directed by harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood, the 22 players – assembled from various strands of chamber-scale early music-making as well as the chamber orchestras of the time – had never met as an orchestra before and were all performing on original historical instruments, which posed various degrees of uncertainty, challenge and risk. Would it work?
The Academy of Ancient Music, named by Hogwood after its 18th-century predecessor, was one of several ‘period bands’ emerging around 1973, but the first to be supported by a record company, thanks to the imagination of producer Peter Wadland, who had been charged by Decca with reinvigorating its historic L’Oiseau-Lyre label. Little did the players imagine that afternoon, as they struggled with tuning, intonation and technique (combined with being under the Heathrow flight path) that – with the benefit of some expert post-performance editing – this would turn out to be the start of a revolutionary endeavour that would change the musical world.
Small-scale exploration of Baroque music on instruments of the period had been taking place for some years, and continental groups led by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt and Sigiswald Kuijken had begun to make a great impression on disc. But the home-grown AAM made an instant impact thanks to the players’ vitality and the freshness of the sound – plus smart marketing and articulate championing by Hogwood himself. A founder member of David Munrow’s hugely successful Early Music Consort, which specialised in medieval and Renaissance repertoire, Hogwood had grown dissatisfied with the degree of unhistorical imagination in their music-making. He wanted to form an ensemble which could be based more securely on the evidence of the past, and so he looked forward into the 17th- and 18th-century period of the Baroque, where detailed treatises and actual instruments survived.
Hogwood had a firm academic background plus expertise in broadcasting: he had been on BBC Radio 3 with his request programme The Young Idea from 1969, even before David Munrow’s famous Pied Piper. He quickly became the most articulate of those arguing for the benefit of historical performance styles. As a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1960s (as was M
