A significant part of Britain’s musical heritage, especially its historic keyboard instruments, manuscripts, and historically informed classical music performance is at serious risk of being irreversibly lost. Restoration and conservation are essential to prevent these treasures from falling into silence, decay, or obscurity — but restoration alone is not enough. To truly safeguard them, they must remain relevant: to audiences, to musicians, to scholars, and to composers. By performing on historic keyboards, studying and sharing historic scores, and inspiring new music to be written for them, we can ensure that these legacies continue to live—not just survive as museum pieces.

This urgency is heightened by wider challenges in the cultural landscape. Music education is being systematically eroded: music departments are closing in universities, funding for creative subjects is being slashed, and music is increasingly cut out of the school curriculum, depriving young people of access to study and play. Traditional crafts are vanishing too: the centuries-old art of luthiery is now classed as critically endangered, with the UK’s only degree course in string instrument-making at Newark set to close, reflecting a wider loss of specialist knowledge in musical instrument crafts — including historic keyboard restoration.

Historic manuscripts face equally grave threats. Many remain hidden in private collections or are deteriorating without proper care. Yet they are irreplaceable sources of knowledge: they preserve original markings, fingerings, and dynamics that reveal true and authentic composers’ intentions; they show how music was performed, ornamented, and understood in its own time; they contain dedications, marginalia, and performance notes that open unique windows into musical culture. Scholars rely on them to reconstruct accurate editions, musicians draw on them to perform authentically, and educators use them to connect students with living history. Without active preservation, study, and performance, these manuscripts risk fading into irrelevance — or being lost entirely.

Considerations including restrictions on trading items containing ivory, customs, and freight costs, add further pressure. Sadly, this risks significant instruments being discarded by owners unable to find homes for them. Each one lost represents a piece of Britain’s heritage slipping away.

For all these reasons, the work of Music That Lives is both urgent and vital. We aim to preserve and restore instruments and manuscripts, but we also aim to bring them back to life: in performance, in education, in research, and in the commissioning of creation of new tonal classical music works. In doing so, we hope to inspire the next generation to value and carry forward this legacy.

If we do not act now, a very significant part of our musical past — and its potential future — could vanish within a few generations.