Early Music (journal)

• 1. Introduction

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  Early Music, the journal, was born in 1973 out of a sense of urgency. John Mansfield Thomson, a New Zealand musicologist who had made London his home, watched a cultural movement stirring around him. Medieval chants, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque counterpoint were finding new audiences. Scholars were debating notation. Performers were rebuilding forgotten instruments. Thomson wanted a publication that could hold all of it together. The question that has followed the journal ever since is whether a single periodical can genuinely serve scholars hunched over manuscripts and amateur listeners who simply love a lute. That tension, between rigorous learning and infectious enthusiasm, is what makes Early Music worth understanding.

• 2. A Founder's Vision

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  John Mansfield Thomson did not arrive at Oxford University Press as a comfortable insider. He worked for many decades in London as a leading figure in the emerging early music revival, and his goal was ambitious: to bridge early music scholarship with mainstream musical life, including figures such as David Munrow. The partnership with OUP brought resources and reach, but Thomson's own account of the arrangement was candid. He worked alongside the OUP's Alan Franks, yet he characterized the relationship with the press as uneasy. His harshest description was reserved for editorial control sitting with the music department, which he called "spiritual death." That friction between scholarly independence and institutional publishing would shape the journal's culture from its first issue.

• 3. Scope and Style

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  Each quarterly issue of Early Music typically carries five to ten articles, accompanied by reviews of books, music, and recordings. The subject matter centers on the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, though the Classical and Romantic eras appear occasionally as well. What sets the journal apart visually is something the librarian Alan Karass identified directly: he called the journal's "extraordinary visual beauty" a distinguishing feature, noting that it frequently includes a variety of visual art alongside its scholarly topics. Karass also drew a careful distinction about the writing itself, describing the articles as "scholarly but not academic in nature" -- a phrase that captures how the journal pitches itself between the seminar room and the concert hall.

• 4. Devoted Issues

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  Certain composers and themes have drawn enough material to fill entire dedicated issues. Guillaume de Machaut, the fourteenth-century French composer and poet, was the subject of issue 5.4. Johann Sebastian Bach received the treatment in issue 13.2. Baroque theatre proved rich enough to require two consecutive issues -- 17.4 and 18.1 -- and dance was explored in depth in issue 26.2. These focused volumes reflect the journal's confidence that a single theme, pursued rigorously across multiple articles and reviews, can yield more than a scattered survey. The practice also signals which corners of early music scholarship the editors have judged ready for sustained attention.

• 5. Editors and Continuity

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  Thomson was the founding editor, and the editorship has passed through several hands since. Nicholas Kenyon and Tess Knighton each served in the role after him. Today the journal is led by three co-editors: Alan Howard, Elizabeth Eva Leach, and Stephen Rose. The spread of responsibility across three editors reflects a publication that now covers enough scholarly ground to require genuinely collaborative stewardship. The journal has been assessed by its readers as "successfully disseminating valuable information" to a community that includes scholars, performers, informed amateurs, and instrument makers and collectors alike -- a range that Thomson originally sought to unite when he launched the first issue more than fifty years ago.