Dodd, Julian, Being True to Works of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. viii + 194

The notion of authenticity in musical performance has been discussed extensively in musicology throughout the past century. The story is well-known to those in the music business. Starting from the early 1920s, an ever-growing number of musical historians and practitioners began to engage in the study of pre-classical music, preparing performing editions of ancient works and recreating period instruments. By the 1950s, this new interest consolidated around what is usually referred to as the “Early Music Movement”, which contributed significantly to the popularization of the notion of authenticity in the musical field. During the1980s, however, interest in “authentic performances” began to crack. Musicologists increasingly mistrusted authenticity for being a naïve concept, a misleading ideal, and one giving rise to a series of cold and mechanical performances. In the 1990s, skepticism became so widespread that music scholars gave up talk of“authenticity” altogether