unoriginal instruments

I was listening to the radio today and a heretical thought crossed my mind:

Hasn't the period instrument stuff gotten boring?

I mean - back in the olden days, say, like the 1970s, when there were folk who clearly had a direct line back to stuff like Mozart, it was a fascinating thing. Musicians, fed up with being able to play familiar scores, started to play them faster just to see if it was possible. Often it wasn't, but we loved it anyway. We were told it was old, but it was new.

And then came the influx of "original instruments" - like real instruments, but impossible to play. So we had stunningly well recorded versions of Bach and, well, more Bach, played sometimes really nearly in tune.

Just like Bach would have heard it himself.

It was a crazy time - people thought of all sorts of things, like using really bad pianos to record Mozart concertos, and then changing 'pitch' - reading the same music but playing a semi-tone lower than you were reading. Really technical stuff. And given that, that most of the notes still came out in the right place and in the right order was awesome. No wonder we gave those guys awards by the bucketful.

But now...

Original instruments sound so...unoriginal.

They're so in tune. So accurate. So together. So like real music. I mean, that's it really. When you go to a concert, you can see some of the flutes are wooden, and some of the string instruments are a funny shape, and some of the trumpets are side-ways on, but when you just listen - it's like listening to proper people playing proper grown-up instruments. It's all so professional.

It's like Simon Cowell has applied autotune to everything.

It is sort of pretty; but it's not so much fun. Somewhere along the way the early music brigade has exchanged its personality for a glossy coat.