Presenters and university concert series have been a place to catch some of the best historical performance ensembles.
Period ensembles can be a hard sell. Most series have at most just a few slots for early music, and they tend to play it safe
The Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City has established itself as one of the most respected concert series in the country. The series presents mostly touring ensembles, from the U.S. and abroad, and started offering period-instrument concerts around 1982. As that genre grew in local popularity and at the box office, Early Music became its own sub-series in 2000. Cellist Dmitri Atapine and pianist Hyeyeon Park, the organization’s artistic directors since 2022, have continued that strong tradition. The series’ 50th-anniversary season in 2025-26 features a dozen concerts and includes three historically informed vocal and instrumental ensembles from Europe — Stile Antico, Venice Baroque Orchestra, and the Tallis Scholars — as well as New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in the complete Brandenburg Concertos (albeit on modern instruments).
“The Early Music series is so unique, and it has such a big following in Kansas City,” Atapine said. “And I feel that it gives voice to what the Friends are in general. To put music in context, you need to acknowledge the past, you need to learn about the present, and you need to look to the future.”
According to Park, the Friends’ early-music concerts draw the same-sized audiences as concerts on its two other sub-series: about 500 people for the chamber music concerts and 600 for the piano offerings. But what sets these attendees apart is their passion for this music and their willingness to attend regardless of who is performing. “There’s a trust between the audience and us,” Atapine said. “They know that we will bring the best and the brightest in many ways, and they love the kind of music they hear.”
Meanwhile, at UChicago Presents, early music has always been part of its offerings. The presenter created a sub-series in 1981 and named it after Howard Mayer Brown, the pioneering Renaissance music scholar who’d formerly been chair of the university’s music department. Nowadays, its season brochure typically includes three or four ensembles, “bringing music to life with authentic, historically informed performances and original instrumentation.”
In 2025-26, UChicago Presents’ annual ensemble-in-residence will be Trio Mediæval. The female vocal trio will present two concerts as well as a range of outreach activities. Sarah Curran, executive director of UChicago Presents, said she is always looking for groups and programs that help illuminate the evolution of music and expand the whole idea of what “early music” can be. In February, for example, the series presented countertenor Reginald Mobley and AGAVE, a San Francisco period-instrument ensemble, in American Originals, a program that featured four centuries of music mostly by Black and brown composers from across the Americas.
“We very definitely have an audience for this,” said Curran. “We have people who come from all over for this series — Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan. They will seek us out and find this work.” Like Boston, New York, and the Bay Area, Chicago is becoming an almost full-time early-music capital. It helps that the Windy City has nationally recognized ensembles spreading the gospel, from Haymarket Opera, Newberry Consort, and Music of the Baroque to, most recently, Cleveland’s Apollo’s Fire making Chicago a second home.
While period-instrument ensembles have a regular place in Kansas City and Chicago, that’s not always the case on other performing arts or chamber-music series, including some of the largest and most prestigious in the country — even where they used to have a sizeable presence. No reliable nationwide data exist, but anecdotal evidence suggests that such presentations are declining in many places or, at best, holding steady. Of course, there are many strong big-city period ensembles, from Seattle and Denver to Houston, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. There are specialist presenters, such as Arizona Early Music and Milwaukee’s Early Music Now. And there are acclaimed festivals devoted exclusively to early music in hubs like Boston, San Francisco, and Bloomington, Ind. But in many parts of the United States, if mainstream arts presenters do not book touring groups, the genre is likely not heard at all.
The reasons for the paucity (or absence) of early music on certain performing arts or chamber-music lineups are varied. In some places, a lack of history of presenting such groups means there’s a limited audience — a variation on the old chicken-egg conundrum. Other presenters point to a simple question of taste: Their potential ticket buyers prefer Rachmaninoff over Rameau. And perhaps there is a sense that the historical-instrument movement is losing some of the novelty and freshness that excited listeners in years past.
Costs and Coursework
The University Musical Society, the performing arts series at the University of Michigan, featured four early-music programs back in 2004-05, including such prestigious groups as Jordi Savall’s Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya from Spain and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from Britain. But just one such ensemble was offered on its 2024-25 lineup: Les Arts Florissants with the Four Seasons. There is no early music booked for 2025-26 — other than its annual modern-instrument Messiah with the Ann Arbor Symphony. The University of Michigan dropped from four to zero in a decade.
Just outside Atlanta, Katie Lehman is executive and artistic director of Spivey Hall, a 492-seat jewel box venue on the campus of Clayton State University. The hall is known for its sparklingly clear acoustic, perhaps ideal for instrumental early music. Lehman would love to present more early-music groups at Spivey but finds such offerings aren’t financially viable. “It’s a dollars and cents thing at the end of the day,” she said. There has to be a minimum amount of ticket revenue to make such concerts feasible, and the audiences just aren’t there. “They want to hear Brahms,” she said, “They don’t want to hear something with the harpsichord. It’s a very basic kind of problem.”
‘They don’t want to hear something with the harpsichord. It’s a very basic kind of problem.’
Lehman found that out the hard way three years ago, shortly after she assumed her post. She booked Europa Galante, a celebrated Italian Baroque orchestra founded by Fabio Biondi. They barely filled half the house. But Spivey’s annual modern-instrument performance of the Four Seasons, by a reduced version of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with concertmaster David Coucheron as soloist, sells out months before the event. “This is what sells. This is what people want,” Lehman said.
Not every presenter of early music is exclusively devoted to the genre. The Middlebury College Performing Arts Series, in small-town Vermont, does not present early music at the same level as UChicago Presents or the Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City, but it makes a point of programming such groups at least every two or three seasons. For the Middlebury series, a big hit in 2024 was Le Consort, a prize-winning French chamber quartet led by charismatic violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte. The ensemble was on its debut North American tour. “We were presenting artists unknown to our audience,” Director Allison Coyne Carroll wrote to me in an email, “in our first wholly Baroque program since before the pandemic, and it was a snowy Thursday evening in February. Despite all this, an enthusiastic and voracious early-music crowd appeared and were on their feet in a thunderous ovation for the engaging young quartet in the end.” By popular demand, the group is returning to the series in March 2026.
Middlebury’s early-music offerings are typically timed to correspond to the first weeks of the music department’s History of Western Music course. “Students should have at least one opportunity to experience early music in their four-year Middlebury career,” Carroll said. In addition to directly aiding the appreciation of the development of Western music, she added, such presentations also provide context for the study of history, politics, and culture across the early modern era.
The excitement around the emergence of the period-instrument movement in the 1980s and ’90s sparked a high demand for such international touring groups as the Academy of Ancient Music and Les Arts Florissants as audiences rushed to hear this fresh approach to old music. Although many of the movement’s biggest stars, such as Christopher Hogwood, Frans Brüggen, and John Eliot Gardner, performed and recorded music that spanned several centuries, it was their interpretations of what had already been standard repertoire — symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven, and the like — that made them famous. Yet as historical performance practices became more mainstream and as modern-orchestra conductors adopted some of the de-Romanticized hallmarks of historical performance — a lighter, brighter, more pungent tone; less vibrato; danceable rhythms; rhetorical phrasing; a repertoire beyond just Messiah, the Four Seasons, and Brandenburg Concertos — the initial rush for specialty period-instrument groups seemed to fade.
Drop Off in Classical Music
Part of the decline in presenting “early music” — works written before about 1750 — may well be a subset of a larger pattern: the noticeable drop in classical music in general on many performing arts series. Music education has dwindled in U.S. schools, except for band programs. From New York to San Francisco and in major cities in between, symphony orchestras and opera companies have proved mostly resilient to economic downturns, rising production costs, and fickle audiences. In smaller locations, the situation is more precarious. According to Aaron Greenwald, programming and engagement director at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, about half of its programing was once dedicated to classical music, but that had dropped to about a third by its 2024-25 season. And he believes series elsewhere have seen similar drops.
Such shrinkage ties directly into what he sees as a dip in the classical-music audience in general, especially in “mid-size markets” like Iowa City. He cited the example of star pianist Emanuel Ax, who has performed often at Hancher and helped inaugurate its new building in 2016 following a devastating flood that forced the demolition of its original 1972 structure. “We recently presented him with [clarinetist] Anthony McGill as part of a residency and we had maybe 800-900 people, which is not awful. But when we presented Ax back in 2016, we had 1,500 people,” Greenwald said.
University-based performing arts series and larger chamber-music series are essential when trying to book star artists and larger ensembles, because they have the budgets to cover the higher fees such artists demand, which specialty early-music series typically don’t. Selling such performers is tough in today’s market, said Rob Robbins, president of Alliance Art Management, which represents such major groups as the Tallis Scholars and viola da gamba master Jordi Savall. His firm often has to make 50 or 60 calls just to get one booking. He finds that broader-interest presenters are looking for a group with “name value” or an intriguing program that they can sell to curious audiences, but there is no consistent formula. “The metrics are unclear to me,” he said. “A lot of it winds up being luck. The date you offered works. It’s a time of the season where they don’t have anything of a classical nature.”
One area where the booking situation has improved for period ensembles, Robbins has found, is chamber-music series, the sort that presents maybe four to eight programs a season and devotes most of their concerts to string quartets and piano trios. But they typically leave one date for what he called the “open category,” which might be a woodwind quintet or perhaps a marquee name such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. “More than they used to, they will now consider an early-music ensemble for that slot if the program is attractive and the size is right. I didn’t used to see that very often.”
Two big determinants in where and how early music succeeds are culture and history. In Iowa City, for example, there is little early music either at the university, where the no music faculty is dedicated to it, or in the region, according to Greenwald, and that directly affects Hancher’s audiences for such offerings. Instead, the city has a strong culture in choral music (a result in part of its strong Scandinavian heritage) and percussion. The university devotes considerable attention to contemporary music, including its Center for New Music, which presented a dozen shows in 2024-25. As a result, concerts in those realms tend to do well, such as an April 24 performance of Third Coast Percussion with composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery that sold out.
“It’s not to say we would never present early music here,” Greenwald said, “but it’s more challenging because there seems to not be a robust enthusiasm in the community.” Cultivating such enthusiasm and establishing an early-music culture can be done one concert at a time with careful bookings, compelling programs, and steadfast patience. But the competition for time and resources from more in-demand genres can make that strategy very difficult.
‘World Music’ Slot
One problem, Robbins said, is getting emerging groups a chance to be heard. “That’s one of my biggest frustrations,” he said. Most series have at most just a few slots for early music, and they tend to play it safe, returning to groups with known names that are reliable draws. “How do we get them to open up their ears to younger ones?” Yet Robbins is pleased that there are series that are willing to book up-and-coming groups along with the stalwarts and help them gain recognition. Some of them are from his own stable of artists. In February, for example, Portland’s Friends of Chamber Music, in Oregon, will host Ruckus (“the world’s only period-instrument rock band”) with bass-baritone Davóne Tines in a program commemorating the nation’s founding. Presenters talk to each other; word of mouth about an exceptional show and an enthralled audience will get around.
Presenters talk to each other; word of mouth about an exceptional show and an enthralled audience will get around.
A positive development in terms of presenters booking ensembles is the widening definition of early music. While it used to mostly mean European music from the 18th century and before, the genre is finding a fresh approach with repertoire and performers from South America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Last season, New York’s Music Before 1800 offered a concert called “Mali Before 1800” featuring Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko — a compelling addition to the series, given that traditional West African kora music predates the European Baroque. Next season, Early Music Now, in Wisconsin, will present “Bamboo and Silk,” classical and folk music from ancient China played on traditional instruments.
These kinds of culturally inclusive programs mean that early-music groups could be presented as part of the expanding global or world music sub-series that many presenters already offer, opening up new booking horizons. “Attitudes are changing and there is more open-mindedness,” Robbins said. “That gives early-music ensembles an opportunity to grow their own repertoire and bring in projects that are interesting to people who wouldn’t describe themselves as early-music fans.”
Kyle MacMillan served as the classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. Now a freelance journalist in Chicago, he’s written for the Chicago Sun-Times, Wall Street Journal, Chamber Music, and other publications.
