O movimento da música antiga em Portugal: Uma biografia

Abstract

The early music movement has become known internationally since the 1960s as a field of musical practice and production, characterized by an interpretative approach based on historical knowledge, with period instruments, as an aesthetic/performative phenomenon. It was, therefore, one of the most decisive transformations in classical music practice during the last hundred years. In Portugal this movement’s history can be divided into different historical phases. Following a first phase of interest in musical heritage in the first half of the 20th century, this movement assumed genuine importance from the 1960s onwards with the pioneering activity of Santiago Kastner, followed by a first generation of musicians specializing in early music, who gave an important boost to the proliferation of the movement in Portugal from the last decades of the 20th century, followed by younger generations who developed and consolidated early music as an autonomous market, made up of specialist musicians, researchers and musicologists, cultural agents and a specific audience. In this sense, a biographical synthesis of a movement whose importance is today incontestable is essential for a better knowledge of musical life in Portugal over the last hundred years.