Discuss how changing perceptions of early music (mediaeval to Baroque) has informed the evolution of present-day performance and reception

Recording and broadcasting technological progress during the twentieth century has allowed many more people to hear differing performances of all kinds of music, amongst them 'early music'. Though such music has always been in the repertoire there is much more available now. Both access to scores, and knowledge of composers from different times and national schools (and their evolution within societies) has expanded increasingly rapidly.At the outset of the 20th C the late 19thC sense of the 'rightness' of 19th C continental musical form, harmony, and performance style was pervasive. A general sense of emulation of the 'great composers' (e.g. Brahms, Wagner, Schumann) was considered to be the civilised expression of music. Earlier musics were routinely 'corrected' to conform with the then 'approved' harmonic style. Much tutelage of musicians reinforced this approved style - and so the attitudes were continued, and most people when listening to music would be very familiar with 'cleaned-up' early music. An example of this is the presence of musica ficta in renaissance music being 'ironed-out' by changing the apparently offensive harmonies to fit with pre-conceived notions of 'modern' compositional styles being in some way superior.Gradually more people heard performances based on both later scholarship and a sense of wishing to understand how earlier music would actually have sounded. These were joined with new scholarship in the construction of earlier, now superseded, instruments. Experiments in performance by, for example, Arnold Dolmetsch in Britain, formed an early example in the twentieth century of this wish to understand. These efforts gave rise to the 'period instrument movement' which has flourished and deepened since the 1960s. The time of the 60s onwards is significant in that it aligns with a broad societal sense of rediscovery and questioning. Gradually, through such endeavours as David Munrow's 15m programmes on BBC radio introducing a wide range of listeners to bite-sized chunks of early repertiore from Gregorian and earlier chant to period instrument bands performing Bach gave an innovative feeling to the absorption of hearing different ways of hearing music which might previous have been felt as somewhat 'staid'.Nowadays, as a result of these efforts, such a ground-breaking achievement as Benjamin Britten's 'Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra', using a theme, and various developments based on it, by Henry Purcell feels anachronistic. Composers wishing to produce something with the same intent as had Britten, might well feel that the appropriate instrumental make-up would be to use period instruments - based on what is now known of those available in the late 17th C (Purcell's time). In fact, many would feel that to do otherwise would be to disrespect Purcell's original intent. Concurrently, the pervasive availability of all kinds of recordings and live performances has come to mean that audiences, too, would feel a similar sense of unease at listening, say to a chant by Hildegarde of Bingen performed by, for example, a Wagnerian specialist.