But, it might be asked, can we not capture that sense of the present in the music of contemporary composers? For some decades now, the early music enthusiast, whether performer or music lover, has witnessed the gradual elevation of early music and its performance to the status of cult objects, resulting in a crisis of the previously ‘relaxed’ relationship that existed with the musical past. It might legitimately be argued that early music, in its struggle to be reincarnated through the schools of performance based on 20th- century ‘historical criteria’, has come to fill the socio-musical role sadly lost to contemporary ‘classical’ music, favouring the evolution of artistic parameters based more on a search for the invariability of language than on a recognition of the jarring new sounds.

For both the wider audience and students, and professional musicians alike, it is less traumatic to preserve the musical tradition intact by means of a musicological approach whose tenets adhere to the past than by advocating a break with many of the aesthetic and musical precepts which for centuries have moulded the listening habits of western ears. It is easier to follow the discourse of Harnoncourt and Leonhardt than that of Stockhausen and Boulez, for whereas the latter force new paradigms into existence, the former chisel away at time-honoured paradigms; for all the newness of their philological reinterpretation, they ultimately reaffirm and define the precepts of those paradigms on their own terms, resulting in an ‘acoustic sense of peace’ between music and the present. In other words, they remind us that, in spite of the occasional licence and liberties taken in interpretation, everything is in its rightful place - comfortably couched in the history of music.

However, our current sense of enjoying an early music paradise would have been impossible without the advent of the recorded disc, which is the true affidavit of recent performing history. Bringing together as it does both the transmitter and the receiver, it may eventually break the age-old spell of music as an inapprehensible object. Thus, music today is much closer than the other arts to being an enduring art form.

In his Codex Urbinas Leonardo da Vinci wrote, ‘painting has the advantage and reigns supreme over music because, unlike unfortunate music, it does not fade after it is created, but rather continues to exist, depicting as though living what in fact is merely surface representation’. The recording, which can be reproduced ad infinitum, has succeeded in creating something akin to that ‘enduring surface representation’, a format that enables the various strata of simultaneity that are peculiar to music to be unravelled whenever and as often as required, without having to resort to complicated specialist techniques to decipher the scores; we are therefore in a position to challenge Leonardo when he attributes to ‘the harmonious proportion of painting’ virtues that nowadays are easily achieved in a recording, bringing to life that harmonious proportion ‘which is composed of simultaneous parts, the sweetness of which, whether combined or in isolation, is apprehended in a single moment’.