Bruce Haynes, Author

Bruce Haynes was born in Louisville, Kentucky. After studying the modern oboe with Raymond Dusté and John de Lancie, Haynes moved to Holland where he studied early music performance from 1964-1967 with Frans Brüggen and Gustav Leonhardt at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. In 1995 he was awarded a Ph.D in Musicology by the Université de Montréal for a study of historical pitch standards.

Haynes began his performing career on the modern oboe in 1960, playing with orchestras in San Francisco (the San Francisco Ballet and Opera orchestras) and Jalapa, Mexico. In 1964 he moved to Holland to study early music performance and began playing the early oboe, or hautboy. Haynes was one of the first 20th-century performers to master the hautboy and was a key figure in setting professional performance standards for it. In the mid-1970s he reintroduced the hautboy to 20th-century France, and was among the first to perform the instrument in Britain, Italy, and Israel. Haynes performed with period instrument ensembles until the early 2000s and made a number of solo and ensemble recordings. He was a founding member of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, along with his wife and long-time musical partner, baroque cellist and gambist Susie Napper. He has performed and/or recorded with Frans Brüggen, Gustav Leonhardt, Sigiswald Kuijken and Barthold Kuijken, among others.

Haynes’ interest in the hautboy and in historical performance practice has led to much research and writing. He has written a number of articles and books and is a contributor to MGG and the New Grove Dictionary of Music. Areas of research include the construction, repertory and playing techniques of the hautboy; the history of pitch; historical performance practice; rhetoric; eloquence and the Passions. Haynes holds various doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and was Senior Fellow of the Canada Council for the Arts in 2003.

• Music for Oboe, 1650–1800: a Bibliography (Berkeley, 1985, 2/1992)
• Lully and the Rise of the Oboe as seen in Works of Art, EMc, xvi (1988), 324–38
• Pitch Standards in the Baroque and Classical Periods (diss., U. of Montreal, 1995)
• A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of A (Scarecrow Press, 2002)
• The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy from 1640 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2001)
• The Oboe (with Geoffrey Burgess), (Yale University Press, 2004)
• The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History of Music for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2007)