Early Music America

The Bay Area musicologist Richard Taruskin, a prolific and wide-ranging scholar whose work has challenged conventional notions of music history and performance, has won the prestigious Kyoto Prize — the first music scholar to win the award.

Despite its 8.5 by 12 centimetres, the Leuven Chansonnier is a huge find. Director Bart Demuyt is thrilled with the fifteenth-century songbook recently discovered by his Alamire Foundation. “It’s been a century since the last time such an important manuscript surfaced in our field.”

As a scholar and musician, David Wulstan, who has died aged 80, established a style of performing Tudor polyphonic music that broke new ground in the 1970s, and has now become mainstream.

Another day, another study undercutting the myth surrounding the 18th-century Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari.Since the early 20th century, musicians and instrument experts have been trying to figure out what, if anything, makes the violins he made sound better.

It was during the Paul Kellogg era of the nineties and the aughts that New York City Opera became a force for Baroque opera—specifically works by Handel, which, with their historical-mythical plots and arrays of pleasing arias, were eminently adaptable to a plethora of production styles.

“The more I looked at this score, the more it continued to scream ‘Vivaldi’ at me. From that point onwards, the process of constructing a strong argument for Vivaldi’s authorship took over.”