ABSTRACT
As a professional classical musician beginning my freelance singing career in the mid-1980s, I took a very minor role in the early music movement which was enjoying its ‘golden age’ at about that time. Early music recordings regularly topped the classical music CD charts and a new breed of early music performer now worked exclusively in historically informed performance. Although musicians had long held an interest in ‘older’ repertoire 1 and the question of ‘authenticity', 2 it was only in the late 1960s and particularly early 1970s that historically informed performance began to take off on a professional level in England. The launch of such ensembles as the Academy of Ancient Music and The English Concert alongside the first publication of the specialist Early Music magazine (all in 1973) represents an important milestone in this development. As a musician familiar with the established practices, norms, traditions, etc. of gaining employment in both the wider classical music field and the specific area of early music performance, it became apparent that, though the two ‘markets’ shared many similarities, there were also differences in terms of how employment, movement between jobs, development and differentiation of job skills, or wages, were structured. Putting this another way, there seemed to be two separate labour markets in operation.
