Along with Nigel Fortune, Oliver Neighbour and Stanley Sadie, he was one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post-World War II generation.

His father, Henry Thurston Dart, a merchant's clerk, married his mother, Elizabeth Martha Orf in 1915.

[7] Dart was injured in a plane crash in Calais in November 1944, and while convalescing from his injuries at a nursing home in Swanley, he first met Neville Marriner.

[8] After leaving the RAF, he studied for a year 1945–6 on a grant with the Belgian musicologist Charles Van den Borren [nl].

[9][10] Dart returned to England in 1946 as research assistant to Henry Moule, a music lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

He worked as an undergraduate on the music manuscripts in the collection of Edward Paston, providing provenances and attributions of some pieces to William Byrd.

[17] Michael Nyman, another of his students at King's, wrote in 1972 that Dart "finally realised his vision of a musical education freed from the pointless strangulation of a system still obsessed with harmony and counterpoint.

[5] During the 1950s Dart participated in annual concerts featuring four harpsichordists, the three others being George Malcolm, Denis Vaughan and Eileen Joyce.

[22] Among the early historically informed recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos were those Dart made with the Philomusica of London (1958–9), with a single instrument assigned to each part.

For the instrumentation of the fourth concerto, he had argued that the enigmatic instruction fiauti d'echo written by Bach meant a type of flageolet, used to train caged birds to sing.

[2] Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: A Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart was published in 1981, edited by Ian Bent.