Battle of the bands ... er, orchestras Period and modern sounds
come together at England's premier summer festival. It all began
as a battle. The "authentic" or "original instruments" movement,
as it was called in the 1970s and 80s, claimed modern orchestras
did not produce the sounds composers such as Bach, Mozart, or
Beethoven would have known.Skip to next paragraph Subscribe
Today to the Monitor Advancing technology in the 19th century
had made all instruments more powerful and accurate. But modern
instruments just didn't sound right to authenticists such as
Christopher Hogwood, who set up his Academy of Ancient Music to
play on instruments with the designs and sounds of earlier
times. The movement was at first obsessed with following exact
markings on musical scores and banishing the rich modern
orchestral sounds thought out of place. Critics responded by
lambasting what they saw as a clinical approach to musicmaking,
and characterized the sounds as "vinegary" or "astringent." The
two sides are finally co