This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
No serious artist dreams of being made “relevant” by bureaucratic fiat. One might aspire to a patron, a discerning society of peers, even the mild tyranny of a visionary impresario. But not a soft-palmed consultant with a metrics dashboard and a mandate to disperse public virtue along the grain of fashionable orthodoxy.
Yet in Britain, this is a governing arrangement that now overwhelms artistic creation. Too many bodies charged with supporting the arts speak a post-aesthetic language that deftly caters to gatekeeping creators. It penalises those without the time, language or temperament to play along. It also rewards a particular lexicon and worldview, fluently spoken by the ideologically house-trained.
For instance, the Arts Council’s criteria — generously garnished with questions like, “Is it groundbreaking? Is it relevant?” — read like the ghost-notes of a management seminar on identity politics with an art module attached to it. These terms are not designed to identify what is excellent, only what is in tune with the prevailing code.
Nowhere is the estrangement between artistic excellence and institutional taste more visible than in the fate of early music. Spanning the medieval to the late baroque, this vast and heterogenous body of Western music is distinguished not just by its chronology but also by the mode of its performance. This is largely influenced by historically-informed practices (HIP) that, since the mid-20th century, have sought to recover period-specific instruments, techniques, tunings and styles of interpretation.
The centrality of HIP in Britain’s postwar musical prestige has been immense, anchored in the international success of pioneers such as John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood, David Munrow, Andrew Parrott, John Butt, the Early Music Consort and the Academy of Ancient Music. But despite the intellectual and technical rigour it demands, institutional support for early music today is patchy at best.
Early music’s performance culture, despite being a laboratory for experimentation, reconstruction and interpretative risk, resists easy inclusion in boxes marked “impact”, “inclusion” or “innovation”. Its makers are burdened with the image of donnish scholasticism or cultural elitism.
This mismatch between perception and practice has led to a sort of structural invisibility. There is no dedicated funding body, no public database and no infrastructure to match its cultural contribution. Because it lacks a clear category within policy frameworks, early music is thus bureaucratically homeless: neither part of the heritage sector, with its emphasis on preservation and commemoration; nor comfortably within the contemporary one, which privileges a shallow understanding of novelty and sociopolitical messaging.
This neglect would be less galling if the efforts to revive early music had failed to evolve, or had merely preserved a fixed canon of consensual, museum-ready works. But this is far from being the case. From its beginnings, the HIP movement has been shaped by curiosity. When ensembles performed Monteverdi with sackbuts, or rendered Bach with a one-to-a-part vocal line, these aesthetic provocations cannot easily be squared as simplistic antiquarian nostalgia. These were interpretative interventions that asked what it meant to listen historically, what modern ears had to lose in the absence of context, and what the dialectic between authority and authenticity can create anew.
Even choices that now seem benign — gut strings, original pitch, continuo realisations — were once greeted with derision, even outrage. The shift to smaller orchestral forces in Mozart, or to mean-tone temperament in 17th century keyboard music, forced fierce debates, thereby faintly echoing the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns — not in the particulars of text versus invention, but in their underlying tension. In other words, whether artistic progress lies in continuity or rupture, in disciplined return or forward rupture disguised as freedom.
HIP, in its best moments, sidestepped this binary by showing how historical constraint could become a form of liberation. What this early music revival revealed was that the past could be radical, and a privileged site for exploring issues of evidence, affect and truth.
And yet the state has largely turned away. In the latest Arts Council England portfolio (2023–26), just three organisations out of nearly 140 music grantees are meaningfully dedicated to early music. The rest must fend for themselves, unaided by the “inclusive” apparatus that somehow forgets they exist. They also navigate a portfolio that is significantly larger than a few years ago, meaning less financial depth and far more administrative noise compared to the early 2000s.
Into this environment, further disrupted by the Covid pandemic, concerned melomanes cautiously stepped in. Tina Vadaneaux, a former banker who founded the Continuo Foundation in 2020, is one of them. Since 2020, with a series of modest grants, Continuo has supported more than 110 ensembles, distributed nearly £1 million in total and facilitated hundreds of performances, often in places where the only other competition is silence.
The modesty of the sums is part of the point: a little money, wisely placed, can go a very long way. It allows ensembles to seize a specific opportunity, rather than chase a generic future. Because the results are tangible, donors are incentivised to give again, knowing their support is visible, audible and locally felt.
This is not a miracle. It is what competence looks like once unencumbered by ideological fog or bureaucratic sprawl. Continuo’s success is, in part, an indictment: it thrives because the official infrastructure has quietly walked away from a sector it once claimed to champion. For many gatekeepers of the cultural state, early music is simply not worth the trouble. It is too obscure, too white, too austere — a domain of dons and dilettantes, ill-suited to absorb the usual gestures toward identity politics without visible strain.
This is nonsense. The reality is that the early music sector is younger, more entrepreneurial and more audience-driven than many of the institutions that still siphon off public money. Most groups operate without salaried staff or fixed premises. They are forced to build projects from scratch, share tasks and reach out to new listeners as a matter of survival. They behave exactly like the agile, decentralised, community-driven organisations that funding bodies claim to want.
Filling a gap that shouldn’t exist, Continuo’s model does almost everything the Arts Council doesn’t. Its grant application takes two hours, not five weeks. Its advisers are harpsichordists and artistic directors, not branding consultants. It has built a working database of ensembles, venues and projects across the UK — something the cultural establishment, despite its bureaucratic halo, doesn’t bother to compile. It does not impose outcomes, buzzwords or loyalty tests. It simply asks: is this musically interesting, viable and worth doing?
Indeed, it is worth doing. Not because it satisfies a strategy document, or mirrors fashionable anxieties, but because it makes something beautiful available to an audience. This ought to be the baseline for public arts support. So why does it feel strangely countercultural?
What Continuo shows is that people do not need a state-backed apparatus to keep this alive. The triumph of groups like the Augelletti and the Bellot ensembles — both of which received grants for debut recordings and have gone on to national recognition — suggests that what is missing is not talent or energy, but intelligent infrastructure. The former, selected as the BBC New Generation Baroque Ensemble for 2023–25, and the latter chosen for the same honour for 2025–27, began with modest Continuo-backed recordings that rapidly gained acclaim. Each has since gone on to secure spots on emerging artist schemes such as the City Music Foundation and the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme — prestigious platforms not historically centred on period performance.
The abandonment of early music shows what happens when aesthetic judgement is outsourced to current state metrics. Anything not immediately legible as political becomes suspect. Complexity is a risk. Excellence, unless accompanied by a suitable narrative, is a problem. Though cloaked in the language of “access”, the effect of this cultural policy is a shrinking of ambition and an erosion of our ability to engage deeply with our cultural past. Unsurprisingly, what plays out on stage is matched in the classroom: early music is barely acknowledged in most GCSE and A-level curricula as the total share of classical music has been steadily sidelined.
Continuo reminds musicians that what they do matters, without distortion. It works because it treats performers as adults and audiences as capable. It respects the art and shows that it does not need to be simplified to be shared and loved. That there is no contradiction between quality and outreach. These days, this feels like a quiet revolution.
Most of all, it proves that the problem is not supply or demand, but visibility, which is easy to resolve with an ounce of willpower. A cultural state that cannot see the richness of its own inheritance, or that sees it as a threat, has already lost its claim to stewardship.
Early music’s challenges are representatives of many other repertoires and artforms. When institutions lose their ability to discriminate with taste, they’re impotent by design: unable to distinguish the good from the fashionable, the meaningful from the tactical. The arts become a mirror for policy, in which rainbow-lanyarded people mimetically agree.
Continuo, by contrast, has done something rare: it has listened. To the music, to the musicians, to the fans. And it has noted the wonderment intrinsic to the art, and its ability for engaging contemporary listeners. This should be the starting point for any cultural renewal worth the name.
