Music on Radio: Part of our heritage Then and now

Although the English musical Renaissance is a term usually applied to the late-Victorian period, there's no doubt that the 1950s and 1960s saw a similar creative flowering, and not just in modern music. While Britten and Tippett were forging a school of national opera, other figures were rekindling interest in remoter areas of our past, and none more famously so than Thurston Dart. There had been early music before, pursued chiefly under the banner of the Dolmetsch family. Britten and Tippett had explored Tudor and Restoration music, to satisfy their own creative needs. But it was Dart, with his passion for detail, executant skills, and upside- down logic, who challenged the old order and, through the power of his own originality, set new and enduring standards for the study of the past.

Last Friday, in what would have been his 75th birthday week, Radio 3's Mining the Archives broadcast two hours of rare recordings by way of tribute to his memory. Presenter Fiona Talkington explained that although Dart was interested in modern music, his contacts with its composers seem to have been few and far between, once he had found his own territory. (For example, his name does not feature in the exhaustive index of Humphrey Carpenter's Britten biography.) Yet it was hard not to sense a spiritual affinity between these mid-century pioneers that told of exciting things at work in this period; something exalted in the zeitgeist. Did scholars and artists aspire more highly in those days, or do they only seem tall to our vision amid the mediocrity that surrounded them? It's an open question; we assume that overall standards have risen greatly in the meantime. But will our successors see us as being so rich in personality?

Something of the gulf between then and now - even the couple of decades since Dart's untimely death in 1971 at the age of 49 - was evident in the producer's choice of performances. There was strong, vital harpsichord playing on powerful instruments whose brilliance seemed enhanced by old recording methods. In particular, Couperin's sixth Ordre, heard in a 1968 BBC Invitation Concert, was a reading to treasure for its musical instincts and for a style of playing that was itself, in the best sense, "period". Nothing delighted Dart better than to stir up his academic friends and rivals with some outlandish theory; about Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, for example. But Sir Neville Marriner and Christopher Hogwood spoke eloquently of his role as inspiration and mentor, while acknowledging both his quixotic temperament - and his flashy waistcoats.

Curiously, however, the gap between then and now was most poignantly expressed in the voices. Dart's own clipped and precise delivery was heard in a 1961 talk about the Elizabethan virtuoso, composer and traitor John Bull, complete with a potted hypothesis about the origins of "God Save the Queen". And there were the legendary vowels of Patricia Hughes, introducing a 1959 Purcell concert of Dart's London Promusica in an elocution that should be saved on crystal discs as a symbol of all that has been gained - or lost - in the intervening years of plurality.

From Third Programme to Radio 3, music on air has managed to bridge that divide. In a sense beyond its subject, this Mining the Archive was evidence of its changing status. Currently deleted, Dart's recordings should be out on CD; 20 years hence, like every historic record ever made, they will surely be available on-line at the touch of a button. That in itself shows how radio's role has altered from public educator to adjunct of the global record shop. Yet it's hard to imagine a commercial station giving two hours' prime time to a dead musicologist. Radio 3 may now be part of the heritage industry, but there are parts of that heritage no other organisation can reach.

NICHOLAS WILLIAMS