My longstanding friend and colleague Judy Tarling, who has died of cancer aged 78, had a profound influence on the performance of baroque music, as the leader of orchestras, a tutor on courses, and above all as the author of books on the subject.
Following studies in violin and viola, she started out as a professional musician in 1970 as a member of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. After two years in Canada, where she developed interests in early music, back in Britain she started playing the baroque violin, forming her own group, Brighton Baroque, and worked as a viola player with period-instrument ensembles such as the Academy of Ancient Music, the Hanover Band and the London Handel Orchestra.
I first worked with her in 1981, when she joined The Parley of Instruments, first as a viola player and subsequently as its leader; her fine playing can be heard on its many Hyperion recordings. She led the development of the Parley’s consort of Renaissance violins, suitable for 16th- and early 17th-century music.
Judy and I developed baroque orchestral courses together, first at Little Benslow Hills in Hitchin and then for the Cambridge Early Music Summer Schools (now Cambridge Early Music), founded in 1993. She also led orchestras for the Suffolk Villages festival and Leeds Baroque, and taught on courses in Europe and the Americas.
She was an inspiring tutor, informed by a profound knowledge of baroque performance practice and its context in classical rhetoric. This was embodied in her five influential books, beginning with Baroque String Playing for Ingenious Learners (2000) and The Weapons of Rhetoric: A Guide for Musicians and Performers (2004), which became required reading for musicians all over the world.
Judy was born in Brighton, the youngest child of William Tarling, a solicitor, and Beryl (nee George), a homemaker. She studied the violin and viola at Brighton and Hove High school, at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, and in London at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music.
In 1970 she married David Garside and moved with him to Toronto the following year, after he accepted a university fellowship there. They returned to the UK in 1973. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982.
Always a keen gardener, with her own beautiful garden in Sussex, she developed an interest in garden history over several decades, leading her to publish Landscapes of Eloquence: Finding Rhetoric in the English Landscape Garden (2020).
She married Peter Lay in 1985. He survives her, along with her children, Kathy and Thomas, her grandson, Griffin, and her siblings Christine and John.
