Bruce Haynes built a career as an oboist in a classical orchestra and has been interested in the history of performance practice and his instrument since his youth. In the late 1960s, he opened a workshop in California where replicas of baroque oboes were crafted under his guidance.

His accumulated experience performing on both modern and historical instruments, as well as his concerts and recordings with renowned musicians and ensembles, and interactions with musicologists, formed the foundation of this book. In it, Haynes explains how codified musical notation and the distribution of musical works on paper gradually stripped Western music of its variability and made it "academic."

In the past half-century, academic musicians have discovered an entire universe behind the strict facade of their discipline, a universe from which the discipline itself emerged, unable to fully dominate it. Thus, the historical end of early music became the condition for its beginning, a new birth to which the author of this book was also connected.