Behind the Scenes, Part III

The third in a series of posts that discuss the general principles important to those in the world of Early Music.

3. The adoption of original performing forces

There is arguably nothing in the world of historically informed performance that has had such a dramatically audible effect on the sound of familiar music than the return to historically appropriate performing forces. This idea almost always involves a reduction of forces, tying in with the overall tendency of the early music movement to strip away the Romantic excesses of traditional performance. It's the same tendency that has seen continuous vibrato vacuumed out of string players' fingers, the sustained sound of legato replaced with a more articulate musical language, and powerful modern instruments pushed aside to reveal the (relatively) more intimate and subtle versions of the past. In short, the turn towards historical performing forces is one of the most significant aspects of the overall quest to downsize modern performance.