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.