peripathetic

Doucaines, symphonies, crumhorns, bombardes...
...they all combined together to make a new medieval music. Except this new medieval music took place not in the 1470s but the 1970s. But towards the end of that decade people got sick of the bells-and-whistles treatment, in which craftsmen had suddenly started to make 'medieval' instruments by the truckload. Why? Because so much of it was guesswork. Nobody *knew* for sure what the things really had sounded like - or how the music was meant to be sung. Or even if it *was* meant to be sung, and not played - or played and not sung.

So that clever chap James Fenton, writing in the Guardian's Review, comes up with another good article, and the book he mentions at the start of it can be bought here.