Book review: Well-tempered woodwinds

Well-tempered woodwinds: Friedrich von Huene and the making of early music in a new world Geoffrey Burgess
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), $45
Reviewed by Edward Breen in Early Music (2016) 44 (4): 647-649. Published:10 February 2017

For the early music movement this is a decade infused with self-reflection. It is over 40 years since the boom of the early 1970s, and many pioneering performers are celebrating long careers that started in small counter-cultural settings and have led to mainstream concert success and global record sales. So it is only natural that we might be interested in how we got where we are, as well as asking where we are going next.

As a contribution to early music nostalgia, this book is much more than a simple biography of Friedrich von Huene, one of the world’s leading historical woodwind-makers; it also investigates his research and influence upon performance. Through this prism it offers both a cultural history of the early music movement in America and its connections to European practice, and a history of modern...

To read the full text of this review, please visit Early Music. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caw101