Just before entering the Brussels Royal Conservatory, I found my first “baroque” one-keyed flute (eventually I found out that it had been made in the mid-nineteenth century as a cheap model and constructed only partly according to eighteenth-century principles). It was not very good, but good enough to guide my first steps, and it made me hungry for more. I had already noticed that much of the flute repertoire before ca. 1750 sounded more appropriate to me on the recorder than on the modern flute, and now, even with this mediocre instrument, things fell into place, and felt natural (whatever that means). While studying at the Brussels Royal Conservatory, I discovered that its library was full of highly interesting scores and theoretical books, most of them then not yet republished, and I spent as much time as possible in this gold mine. This occurred parallel to, and independently of, my regular Boehm (modern) flute studies, which I enjoyed very much as well.
A decisive event happened during my first year at the conservatory; I found a splendid original flute—an incredible piece of luck for a boy of eighteen!—made in Brussels around 1750 by Godefroy Adrien Rottenburgh, one of the great woodwind instrument makers of the eighteenth century. Again, I had to proceed as an autodidact, since nobody was around to teach me the baroque flute. This proved to be a blessing—I had to make all mistakes myself and to discover by myself that (and why) they were mistakes. It was a slow learning process, but my good old flute was to become the best teacher I ever had. As really good instruments do, it showed me how it wanted (or did not want) to be played. Of course I continued my Boehm flute studies, simultaneously taking two years of art history at Ghent University. Following that, I studied for one year in Holland, focusing on contemporary Boehm flute repertoire. This should hardly be a surprise as contemporary music, just like music before Bach or Handel, was largely ignored (or ridiculed) at the conservatory, and this greatly stimulated my interest. In contemporary, often experimental, music, as in Early Music, and more than in the typical conservatory repertoire, the active and creative participation of the performer is required, and in the sixties and seventies many colleagues were simultaneously focusing on old and very new music, both left and right from the mainstream repertoire. But I felt that Early Music was my real passion, and during the following years, modern flute and contemporary repertoire gradually receded into the background.
My interest in research was prompted by those areas of my musical training (both at an early stage and at an advanced level) that seemed to contradict each other. Some examples:
• We were more or less explicitly expected to have perfect pitch, officially based on a1 = 440 Hz, but modern orchestras played much higher, and old instruments could deviate from this by as much as a whole tone up and down.
• We learned that the major second consisted of the chromatic semitone (such as F—F
• In theory lessons we were shown the metrical realization of appoggiaturas (it was, astonishingly, basically the same theory as formulated in most of the eighteenth century), but in playing Bach or Mozart, we were not expected to apply these rules.
• All trills were to be started on the main note, but eighteenth-century treatises taught to start them from the upper note.
• Solfège and instrumental technique aimed at a literal, precise reading and rendering of the notation. Rhythmic freedom was not encouraged; I suppose this was judged too romantic for the post–World War II neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Historical treatises such as Quantz or Hotteterre, on the contrary, showed that the shortest note values in a given piece were frequently treated with considerable freedom and that rubato did not have the same meaning as today.
• I wondered why we did not analyze baroque or classical music according to eighteenth-century principles rather than using uniformly Schenkerean theory or functional harmony.
Further, the information I had begun to glean from historical treatises and instruments showed me how much standards and traditions changed over time. However, I did not hear or learn a substantially different approach in sound production, phrasing, or articulation according to different eras or countries: Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Debussy, Hindemith, Prokofiev, or Britten were all subjected to a rather uniform post-romantic interpretation. This was illustrated by many “modern” editions of, for example, J. S. Bach’s music—they were freely annotated by well-known and well-meaning virtuosos, without specifying how the original text read. On the other hand, the existence of several different Urtext editions of one and the same work demonstrated the necessity of seeing the original sources myself, in order to make up my mind autonomously. In some cases, this later led me to publishing one more—again different—Urtext edition.
I could not understand how baroque music, as it was frequently played before the Early Music revival, could be so mechanical, straightforward, unemotional, even simplistic, compared with baroque paintings, statues, literature, or architecture. I wondered which role music played in the different layers of society, and how its features would vary according to its function. I also felt the need to examine the positioning of the performer between the composer and the audience, varying according to the nature of the piece to be performed. It became increasingly easy to find historical recordings by famous singers and actors, conductors, pianists, violinists, flautists, from the first half of the twentieth century. Many were reissued, first on LP, later on CD; YouTube and the Library of Congress’s “National Jukebox” now make an overwhelming amount of historical sound and/or image information readily available for study. These recordings showed me how fast aesthetics, style, and fashion can change. I discovered a generally much freer and more varied approach to dynamics, tempo, and rubato, less ultimate precision in playing together, and much less scrupulous fidelity to the musicological/scientific model of (Ur)text. These recordings demonstrate highly prominent individual virtuosity and artistic presence. This reinforced my conviction that performance in earlier times might have been very different from today’s standards indeed. Questioning traditions and conventions thus became a habit, and research became a vital necessity.
Initially my research focused on the baroque flutes and recorders, as played from ca. 1660—the first appearance of baroque recorders at the court of Louis XIV, where the one-keyed baroque flute arrived some twenty years later—until the end of the eighteenth century when multi-keyed flutes became widely adopted. Soon after, I started studying the instruments, performance practice, and repertoire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Occasionally I extended my research into Renaissance flutes and recorders and their repertoire. Purely theoretical books and treatises for other instruments provided me with the general framework in which to integrate the flute. After all, the flute and the recorder are not such important instruments! Much more was written about the voice, the violin, and the keyboard.
It became obvious to me that a general historical-artistic truth cannot exist and that every performer’s conclusions inevitably depend on one’s individual choices, driven by one’s own artistic temperament, and made within the context of acquired historical knowledge. Research further helped me to understand the sound behind (or before) the notation and pointed to the necessity of “creative reading”; namely, learning to supplement what was not written. Even in the best situations, when this is done with respect for style and the genre and character of the music, we can only operate within a field of probabilities with fluctuating boundaries. I understood better