Letter to the Editor: ‘It’s sort of a compliment that the current re-structuring of the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra is taken as a paradigm for the decline in early-music studies in higher education…I see HBCO returning to its roots in a necessary and salutary way.’

From the Executive Director: Early music suffered another painful blow when the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra lost its university funding. But if we want to keep historical performance alive, we have to think bigger than just protecting individual programs at the collegiate level, and, for nonprofit ensembles, think bigger than just fighting for our own little slice of pie.

Searching for music actually linked to the late-14th c. ‘Canterbury Tales,’ Elisabeth Ellison found almost none. So she searched the archives and found dance tunes and sacred works that Geoffrey Chaucer and his pilgrims may have heard in their own day.

The rise of public concerts in the 1720s and ’30s was in indicator of social innovations that would come to the fore during the American Revolution. Remarkably, colonial America produced musicians and paying audiences needed for public concerts not long after the trend started in Europe. But not everyone on our shores approved.