History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
––– George Santayana, Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist
The ear was not yet ready for old harpsichords. True, there were neglected historic harpsichords and old organs, although most of them were not in good order. Gradually you discovered, with little shocks, what you had missed. Actually, the whole development of historic keyboard playing is exactly that – noticing things that you had previously overlooked. That remains true today.
––– Gustav Leonhardt, Dutch keyboardist and leading figure in the historically informed performance movement to perform music on period instruments.
The natural trumpet is the one instrument not yet fully revived for use in the performance of Baroque music. A handful of recordings are available and very rarely a concert featuring solo performances on the instrument is given, but to a great extent the idiosyncrasies of the natural harmonic series are still considered to be beyond reliability in the recording studio or in live performance.
––– Robert Barclay, Canadian scholar of baroque natural trumpets, quoted from 1998
It’s shocking to have a quote of mine from way back in 1992, and not to have had the courtesy of adding either date or context. Anyone reading this would assume that’s today’s attitude. This is simply unacceptable.
Bob–sorry if I misrepresented you. Of course, to be fair, any quote might misrepresent someone’s mind-set at a later time. I wonder if you could tell us what your current thoughts are? By the way, I’ll edit to supply the date of the quote. But, it looks like it was 1998, not 1992.