The re-emergence of Renaissance and early Baroque music for brass in Leipzig and Berlin in the late nineteenth century was the first flickering of awareness of a lost musical past. In the 1930s, performances, published editions and pioneering records of instrumental music by Giovanni Gabrieli and his contemporaries gathered ground in Germany, Paris and London. In subsequent decades, moreover, sustained developments driven by interested performers and scholars activated an ‘early music revival’ that transformed performance practice, the expectations of a wider musical public, the structure of the musical profession and musical training in the conservatoire sector. As ‘historically informed performance’ (HIP) consolidated from the 1970s and its field of study extended to the Romantic period, the revival of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century repertoire became pertinent to brass players and scholars, who were curious about the origins and repertoire of brass instruments and the relevance and viability of informed performances. Their interest and endeavour prevailed; in the last decade of the twentieth century, an international network of players, organologists and other interested scholars produced a watershed of brass historical performance. As well as outline wider developments, this chapter will examine British discoveries and debates that prevailed into the twenty-first century.

Just over a century earlier, Julius Kosleck’s playing in J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor at the Royal Albert Hall in 1885 was a highly important ‘historical’ brass event in Britain, at which he played what became known as the ‘Bach trumpet’. It was at this time that the performance of Renaissance music by small groups of modern brass emerged in Germany. Kosleck’s published transcription of Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sonata pian e forte and other pieces sheds light on late nineteenth-century performance practice, by way of detailed information on instrumentation, tempo and phrasing. There is little apparent evidence to date, however, of the comparable performance of similar music in Britain at that time, other than the trombonist George Case’s dedication to the music of Schütz.

Later, in 1931, musicologist Giacomo Benvenuti inaugurated a series of publications for Ricordi in Milan, with a detailed critical commentary that was rare at that time. This was followed by Curt Sachs’s experimentation in performance practice, including modern brass instruments.