Renaissance Workshop Company
The foremost manufacturer of early musical instruments worldwide

RWC logo

| Home | About us | Products | Prices | Buy | Services | Bookstore | Projects | SecondHand | Knowledge | News | Testimonials |

     

Search:
 

 

Instrument & Kits

Spares & Tools

Books & Drawings

 
Knowledge Base -->  Early Music -->  Revival -->  Protagonists |

The protagonists of the Early Music Revival

The revival of interest in early music remains a prominent and influential feature of the Western classical music scene. But the revival had roots in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries with proponents as diverse as Felix Mendelssohn, Arnold Dolmetsch and Wanda Landowska. Without these pioneering and zealous individuals, and the famous 19th and early 20th century collectors of musical instruments, the revival may never have occurred nor reached such a wide public.

This list is a summary on the lives and work of collectors, enthusiasts, craftsmen and musicians who had an impact on the course of the early music revival.

         
 

Isolde Ahlgrimm

 
    Coming from a traditional Viennese pianistic background, Ahlgrimm (1914–95) taught herself the playing techniques of early keyboard instruments from Baroque treatises and thus laid some of the foundations for the development of performance on period instruments in the 20th century.

As the wife of the art dealer Erich Fiala, she had access to a uniquely rich and constantly changing collection of historical instruments, which eventually served to provide a whole orchestra for her later recordings.

She made numerous concert tours in Europe and the USA and was one of the first musicians to perform a complete cycle of keyboard works by a single composer, recording her Bach cycle for Philips in the 1950s.

She was one of the original pioneers of the early music revival alongside Arnold Dolmetsch and Wanda Landowska (1879–1959), yet unlike these figures she sank into oblivion owing to such factors as World War II and the Nazi annexation of Austria.

 
         

         
 

Wulf Arlt

 
    The musicologist Wulf Arlt conducted from 1970 to 1978, the Schola Cantorum and built up the research department.  
         

         
 

Jonathan Askey

 
    Early in the 60's, Jonathan Mark Askey (1948-2017) was teaching crafts in a local school in Bradford and having already made a number of guitars, he continued making some viols and other musical instruments. He has been always proud that one of his first racketts formed part of David Munrow's collection.

Jonathan Askey has profoundly influenced the development of the early music movement and the quality of instrument making since he joined J Wood & Sons Ltd. back in 1972. He managed Woods Bradford music shop, 'The Early Music Shop' for many years. The Early Music Shop was set up in 1968 along with a workshop manufacturing replicas of medieval and renaissance instruments. Jonathan drove the Woods' workshop until 1999 when he bough the complete workshops and continued its production with a new name: the Renaissance Workshop Company Ltd.

Encouraged in the early years by the late David Munrow and many of his pioneering contemporaries, it is true to say that Jonathan has been in the early music field as the early music revival itself. He has certainly contributed to the continuing interest there has been in this music, making early music and its performance on original instruments accessible to a growing number of people.

See our history

 
         

         
 

Anthony Baines

 
    Anthony Cuthbert Baines (1912-1997) was an English organologist who produced a wide variety of works on the history of musical instruments, and was one of the 11 people founding of the Galpin Society in 1946, the first ever dedicated to musical instruments, named after the foremost British authority and collector up to that time Canon Francis W. Galpin, which Journal Anthony was to edit for twenty-one years.

He started learning clarinet and bassoon, and collecting musical instruments, particularly old wind instruments.  While still a student he was noticed by Sir Thomas Beecham and offered in 1933 the job of bassoon and contra bassoon player with the London Philharmonic.

His first book, Woodwind instruments and their History was published in 1957.

In 1968 when Philip Bate presented his outstanding collection of woodwind instrument to the University of Oxford, Anthony Baines, by then the world's leading authority on woodwind instruments, was the obvious choice for the position of curator, and took up the post in 1970, where he was until his retirement in 1980. His book Brass Instruments was published 1976 followed by numerous articles for the New Groves.

The Bate Collection being a playing collection, he founded the Bate Band which gave concerts of Haydn and Mozart on the Collection’s instruments. These were among the earliest performances of music of this period on original instruments.

 
         

         
 

John Barnes

 
    John Robert Barnes, (Windsor, 11 Oct 1928- Edinburgh, 9 March 1998). One of the most knowledgeable figures in the world of early keyboard organology.

John Barnes trained as a physicist at the University of London. In 1962 he began to pursue professionally his interest in early keyboard music and instruments by building and restoring harpsichords and clavichords. His work was always carried out with excellent technical skill and this was complemented by his methodical scientific approach.

His own keyboard building output has been small, but he has exerted considerable influence through his unqualified support to builders of historical building practices. He was generous in the extreme with his knowledge and expertise.

He has published widely in all aspects of the organology of the harpsichord, clavichord and early piano.

He affected the production of harpsichord kits along these lines through his association in the mid-1970s with Zuckermann, and with J.Woods and Sons Ltd. in Bradford (the former Early Music Shop' workshops, now the Renaissance Workshop Company).

He knew that the old methods and materials had produced superb results. His principle was: Try the historical method first. It will almost certainly work well. If it really doesn't, then think again perhaps.

 
         

         
 

Philip Bate

 
    Philip Argall Turner Bate (Scotland 1909–1999) was a musicologist, broadcaster and collector of musical instruments.

Beginning from the time he was at school, Bate had been interested by old musical instruments, which he began to collect and study. Bate spent most of his career working for the BBC's music department.

Whilst in London he made friendships with those who shared his interests, one lifelong friend being Canon Francis Galpin, who encouraged Bate to turn his scientific education to the study of musical instruments. Bate used his woodworking skills to make and restore instruments in his collection and after learning metalworking techniques, made reproductions of draw-trumpets which were used by David Munrow's Early Music Consort of London.

In 1946 Bate and a group of friends founded the Galpin Society, the first group to specialize in the history and study of musical instruments. He was its first chairman and from 1977 was its president until his death. As well as writing articles for the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Bate wrote several books.

By the mid-1960s his collection had grown until it covered the history of woodwind from 1680 onwards, as well as including some brass instruments and an important collection of printed instrument tutors.

Convinced that the collection was of value to those concerned with the interpretation of music, and that the instruments should be used and properly maintained, he gave the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments to the University of Oxford in 1968, on the condition that it was used for teaching and was provided with a specialist curator to care for and lecture on it.

Bate continued to add to the collection, and it grew through the acquisition of collections made by many of his friends and colleagues in the Galpin Society.

 
         

         
 

Walter Blandford

 
      Walter Fielding Holloway Blandford (28 Dec.1874 - 23 Jan.1952) was a horn-player and musicologist educated in Natural Science in 1886. After some years as lecturer in entomology he changed careers and switched to law. During World War One, Blandford worked in the censor's department of the War Office, and seems not to have returned to his legal practice.

Blandford's interest in music seems to have begun at school. At about 13 he took up the cornet 'as a means of sublimating my musical libido' but was forced to give it up by internal trouble. Although details do not survive it is clear that throughout his twenties and thirties he was playing a great deal, at a semi-professional level, and that he continued to do so on a less frequent basis well into the 1920s.

Besides being a player Blandford was also a collector and musicologist, and his writings on the horn and other instruments, though few, were very highly regarded by the next generation of organologists. In 1920 Blandford met the man who was to become his closest musical friend and correspondent, Reginald Morley-Pegge. Blandford had the leisure to correspond very widely, and although the Morley-Pegge letters are the most numerous, there are also substantial surviving collections of his letters to Lyndesay Langwill and Philip Bate, Kathleen Schlesinger, Arthur Falkner, and T.S.Wotton.

 
         

         
 

Thomas Binkley

 
    Thomas Binkley (1932-1995), lutenist and musicologist, began his professional career with the Munich-based performance ensemble Studio für Alte Musik in 1959 with Nigel Rogers, Sterling Jones, and Estonian singer Andrea von Ramm. The group, later known as the Studio für Frühen Musik, has been one of the most influential ensembles ever in the performance of medieval music.

From 1973 to 1977, Binkley taught and performed at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland and upon his return to the U.S., he was visiting professor at Stanford University (1977, 1979).

Thomas Binkley was perhaps unrivalled in his field, particularly in the performance practice of medieval monody. He was a charismatic person whose thoughts and feelings about music-making, teaching, performance, and musicianship challenged and inspired all who came into contact with him.

 
         

         
 

Suzanne Bloch

 
    Suzanne Bloch (born in Geneva in 1907 - died in New York in 2002) was a Swiss-American musician and an influential pioneer of Early Music Revival during the 20th century.

She went to Paris to study music with Nadia Boulanger in 1925, and decided to become a lute player after hearing an early-music concert. She went on to study music in Paris and Berlin, and she met Arnold Dolmetsch in England in 1933. Dolmetsch sold her a lute from 1600 that he had restored himself. In 1935 she performed at the Hazelmere Festival in England, and soon afterward returned to New York, where she began her concert career. She was one of the founding members of the Lute Society of America in the 1970's.

 
         

         
 

Erwin Bodky

 
      Erwin Bodky, founder of the Cambridge Society for early Music, was born in East Prussia n 1896. By the age of twelve he was known as a child prodigy on the piano.

In the 1920's Bodky made some of the first authentic instrument recordings of early music for L'Anthologie Sonore using an original Ruckers harpsichord.

In America Bodky began conducting the school's orchestra in early music concerts at Harvard's Germanic Museum. In 1942 he and a group of supporters formed a committee to continue the series in the Houghton Library at Harvard. The next year, the Cambridge Collegium Musicum was formed with Wolfe Wolfinsohn, Iwan D'Archambeau, and Erwin Bodky as its nucleus. In 1952, the Collegium was reorganized as the Cambridge Society for Early Music.

 
         

         
 

Nadia Boulanger

 
    Juliette Nadia Boulanger (16 September 1887 – 22 October 1979) was a French composer, conductor and teacher who taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century. Boulanger was the first woman to conduct many major orchestras in America and Europe, including the BBC Symphony, Boston Symphony, Hallé, New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia orchestras.

She was instrumental in the revival of early music.

 

 
         

         
 

Josiane Bran-Ricci

 
         
         

         
 

Frans Brüggen

 
    Frans Brüggen - once the world's most famous recorder player, today he is considered among the foremost experts in the performance of eighteenth century music. He was born in Amsterdam and studied musicology at the university there.

In 1981, he founded the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, which comprises some sixty members from 19 different countries. The musicians, who are all specialists in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music, play on period instruments, or on contemporary copies.

 
         

         
 

Richard Burnett

 
    English pianist Richard Burnett has been collecting historical keyboard instruments, concentrating on early pianos, for some 40 years. By the mid-1970s the collection was housed at Finchcocks, a large country house near Goudhurst in Kent, and can still be visited there. Formerly, a group of ten highly skilled craftsmen conserved, maintained and restored the ever increasing number of instruments. One of the craftsmen, Derek Adlam, Richard Burnett's business partner, concentrated on building replicas of harpsichords, clavichords and early Viennese pianos.  
         

         
 

Safford Cape

 
    Safford Cape (Denver 1906 - Brussels 1973), American conductor, composer and the founder (1933) and director of the Pro Musica Antiqua Ensemble of Brussells.  
         

         
 

Thurston Dart

 
    Robert Thurston Dart (3 September 1921 – 6 March 1971), was a British musicologist, conductor and keyboard player. From 1964 he was Professor of Music at King's College London.

During this time at Cambridge (1947-1962), Dart was the most effective British supporter of the modern early music revival, in part through his influence on those who ultimately formed such groups as the Early Music Consort of London.

As a continuo player he made numerous appearances on the harpsichord, and made many harpsichord, clavichord and organ recordings, especially for the L'Oiseau-Lyre label; he was also a conductor. He served as editor of the Galpin Society Journal from 1947 to 1954 and secretary of Musica Britannica from 1950 to 1965.

 
         

         
 

Alfred Deller

 
    Alfred George Deller (31 May 1912 – 16 July 1979), was an English singer and one of the main figures in popularising the return of the counter-tenor voice in Renaissance and Baroque music during the 20th century. He is considered the first modern counter-tenor.

As an early proponent of 'historically informed performance', Deller was an influential figure in the renaissance of early music. After singing in the concert which inaugurated the BBC Third Programme in 1947, he made hundreds of broadcasts, both as a soloist and as a member of the Deller Consort, a group of singers he founded in 1950, helping to bring this form of performance to the popular consciousness.

In 1963 he founded Stour Music Festival, one of the first festivals in the world devoted to early music which continues to this day.

 
         

         
 

Bruce Dickey

 
    Bruce Dickey is one of a handful of musicians worldwide who have dedicated themselves to reviving the cornetto - once an instrument of great virtuosi, but which lamentably fell into disuse in the 19th century. The revival began in the 1950s, but it was largely Bruce Dickey, who, from the late 1970s, created a new renaissance of the instrument, allowing the agility and expressive power of the cornetto to be heard once again.

In addition to performing, Bruce Dickey is much in demand as a teacher, both of the cornetto and of seventeenth-century performance practice.

He was a member for over ten years of Jordi Savall’s Hesperion XX

 
         

         
 

Christian Döbereiner

 
         
         

         
 

Arnold Dolmetsch

 
    Eugène Arnold Dolmetsch (24 February 1858 - 28 February 1940), was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey. He was a leading figure in the 20th century revival of interest in Early Music.

His interest in early instruments was awakened by seeing the collections of historic instruments in the British Museum, and, after constructing his first reproduction of a lute in 1893, he began building clavichords and harpsichords for Chickering of Boston (1905–1911), then for Gaveau of Paris (1911–1914).

He went on to establish an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey and proceeded to build copies of almost every kind of instrument dating from the 15th to 18th centuries, including viols, lutes, recorders and a range of keyboard instruments. His 1915 book The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries was a milestone in the development of authentic performances of early music. In 1925, Arnold Dolmetsch passed the direction of recorder production over to his younger son, Carl.

He was also largely responsible for the revival of the recorder, both as a serious concert instrument, and as an instrument which made early music accessible to amateur performers. He went on to promote the recorder as an instrument for teaching music in schools.

 
         

         
 

Carl Dolmetsch

 
    The youngest son of Arnold Dolmetsch, Carl Frederic (born Charles Frédéric) (23 August 1911 - 11 July 1997) was an outstanding figure in the history of the revival of the recorder in the 20th century, with a performing career, as a soloist and with the Dolmetsch Recorder Consort, that lasted about 75 years.

Carl was a craftsman of the recorder in the family workshops and took the direction of the company in 1925. He also directed the Haslemere Festival from 1947 to 1996. He published and lectured extensively, being responsible for many editions of ancient recorder music and also for commissioning new works by contemporary composers. He founded and directed the Dolmetch International Summer School, originally for recorder and now including viols, keyboards and other instruments.

Carl personally invented and developed  in 1947 the inexpensive plastic recorder which did much to promote the instrument for use in schools.

 
         

         
 

David Dushkin

 
         
         

         
 

David Freeman

 
    David Freeman (1937-2009) introduced the viol to many new players in Czechoslovakia after moving there from England in 1988, establishing courses in making and playing period instruments under the umbrella of the organization Modi Gaudio, which he founded with his wife, the Czech musicologist Michaela Freemanova. In the 1990s he served as the VdGSA's official representative in the Czech Republic. When it proved difficult to obtain good strings, he appealed successfully to the VdGSA membership to fill the need, through Presidents Ellen Powers and Richard Bodig. An ancillary benefit of the interest he inspired was the production of inexpensive student viols made in Czechoslovakia (later Czech Republic) and sold there, in the U.S., and elsewhere as well, enabling new enthusiasts to take up the viol. He and his wife ran the Czech Early Music Festival in Prague for several years and have promoted early music in many ways, through workshops and concerts as well as courses in performance, tuning and temperament, and instrument making.  
         

         
 

George Guest

 
         
         

         
 

Francis Galpin

 
    Canon Francis William Galpin (Dorchester, 1858 - Richmond, 1945) Church of England clergyman, musicologist, and antiquary who spent a lifetime in the practical study of old instruments, in collecting them and recording their history.

Honouring him, The Galpin Society was created in October 1946.
Website of the Galpin Society

 
         

         
 

Gusta Goldschmidt

 
         
         

         
 

Violet Gordon Woodhouse

 
         
         

         
 

Hugh Gough

 
         
         

         
 

Peter Harlan

 
         
         

         
 

Nikolaus Harnoncourt

 
    Nikolaus Harnoncourt (6 December 1929) is an Austrian conductor, particularly known for his historically informed performances of music from the Classical era and earlier.

Starting out as a classical cellist, he founded his own period instrument ensemble in the 1950s, and became a pioneer of the Early Music movement.

Around 1970, Harnoncourt started to conduct opera and concert performances, soon leading renowned international symphony orchestras, and appearing at leading concert halls, operatic venues and festivals.

 
         

         
 

Ian Harwood

 
    Ian Harwood (August 29, 1931 - July 27, 2011), became a chorister at Winchester Cathedral at the age of 10. From 1948 until 1952, he studied an aircraft engineering. Ian's interests in music and aeroplanes were to shape the rest of his life.

He bought his first playable lute from the lutenist Diana Poulton, who also taught him to play the instrument. Together, in 1956, they founded the Lute Society, the world's first such organisation.

In 1958 he embarked on a precarious career as maker and player of lutes combining with research in the Oxford libraries. In 1960 he made his debut as a professional lutenist, and in 1964 he was awarded the Tovey Prize for his research into the sources of English lute music. He founded the Campian Consort in 1967, performing and recording much 16th- and 17th-century music with this and other ensembles.

In 1979 he resumed instrument making, this time concentrating on reproducing renaissance viols to apply the results of his research into pitch standards. Ian suggested that the different sizes of surviving 17th-century instruments could best be explained if two pitch standards had been used.

When a large order from an American university was cancelled without compensation, in 1984, he put musical instrument making and performing to one side and returned to his earlier interest in aviation.

In 1998 Harwood was elected president of the Lute Society, in succession to Robert Spencer.

 
         

         
 

Friederich von Heune

 
    Born and raised in Germany, he emigrated to the US in 1948 and served as a flutist in the US Air Force. In 1956 he graduated from Bowdoin College (ME) and began a four year apprenticeship with the legendary flute maker Verne Q. Powell.

Friedrich von Huene was a pioneer in the reproduction of historical woodwinds for over half a century. In 1960 he founded The von Huene Workshop, Inc. and began producing his own recorders. In 1966 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a comparative study of historical woodwinds, becoming one of the first makers to produce copies of original 18th century recorders.

Mr. von Huene designed the extraordinarily popular Rottenburgh recorders for Moeck as well as the first high-quality plastic recorders for Zen-On.

 
         

         
 

Paul Hindemith

 
         
         

         
 

A. J. Hipkins

 
         
         

         
 

Chistopher Hogwood

 
    Christopher Hogwood, a celebrated conductor, musicologist and keyboard player, is universally acknowledged as one of the most influential exponents of the historically informed early-music movement.

His catalogue has over 200 recordings with the Academy of Ancient Music on Decca.

Christopher is Emeritus Honorary Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Music at Gresham College, London.

Christopher Hogwood's official site

 

 
         

         
 

Frank Hubbard

 
         
         

         
 

Edgar Hunt

 
         
         

         
 

Carleen Hutchins

 
    Carleen Hutchins 1911-2009) deepened the understanding of viola da gamba construction. She was featured in Life magazine and Scientific American for her contributions to violin-making, and received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to further her research in acoustics, founding the Catgut Acoustical Society in 1963 to share and encourage research. She developed free-plate tuning techniques for testing and refining the front and back plates of an unassembled instrument to ensure the best possible sound from the finished product—techniques that are widely used today—and generously shared her approach with other makers of violin-family instruments and viols. She also developed the "new violin family" of eight instruments from treble violin to contrabass.  
         

         
 

Dietrich Kessler

 
    Born 1929 Zurich Switzerland, d.2006 London UK. Trained at the Swiss Violin Making School at Brienz under Adolf König. Worked for Arnold Dolmetsch Ltd. in Haslemere, UK, later moving to Albert Arnold Ltd. in Charing Cross Road with Cyril Jacklin until that business closed in 1955. From 1955 to 1969 he worked freelance for the Withers shop in Wardour Street, London, succeeding to Stanley Withers on his retirement. In 1987 he sold the shop (which continued with the Withers name under Adam Whone) and worked from his home in North London. From an early period specialised in viol making, building a commemorative viol for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II 1953.

He concentrated on English instruments, particularly viols.

In a world so often noted for its secrecy and closely guarded expertise, he was generous with his knowledge, and effortlessly maintained a sense of wonderment at instruments and their craftsmanship.

Kessler was born in Switzerland, and was accustomed to hearing and taking part (as a cellist) in the family chamber music. His playing skills not quite sufficient to merit further study after attending his local Steiner school, he turned to his other interest, woodwork, and went on to study at the recently formed school of violin making in Brienz, from 1946 to 1950. Instruction there was not just the conventional stringed instrument family, but covered ukuleles, guitars, balalaikas and viols.

After a four-year apprenticeship, he came to England - to enlarge his experience with a range of instruments - first working for the stringed instrument department of Dolmetsch in Haslemere, Surrey. There he made viols, worked out how to make a lute and carried out repairs. But his wish to broaden his knowledge of fine old instruments still eluded him, so in 1952 he left to work for Sotheby's expert Cyril Jacklin at Albert Arnold, in London's Charing Cross Road, where he carried out repairs and modernised old English violins bought at auction by Jacklin (put in longer bass bars, longer necks), work which today would be regarded as heresy, but at the time was considered a service to musicians.

After Jacklin closed down the business, Kessler turned freelance, and managed to suport his young family through repairs, working for the trade. At home, he had started making viols, and sold these to a gradually expanding base of customers. In 1969 he bought the last remaining violin shop in Soho's Wardour Street, Edward Withers Ltd, and employed a stream of makers and repairers who needed to adhere to his work ethic of quality and speed.

 
         

         
 

Ralph Kirkpatrick

 
         
         

         
 

Ton Koopman

 
         
         

         
 

Günther Körber

 
      German maker of renaissance wind instruments.  
         

         
 

Sigiswald Kuijken

 
         
         

         
 

Wieland Kuijken

 
    One of the leading exponents of the viola da gamba of the late 20th century, Wieland Kuijken (b. 1938) has been an important teacher of viol and Baroque cello at the Brussels Conservatoire and The Hague for many years, inestimably influencing the world of viola da gamba performance through his students as well as his own playing. Especially known for his performances with his brothers Sigiswald and Barthold (violin and Baroque flute), he has recorded with such early music leaders as Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, and Alfred Deller.  
         

         
 

Wanda Landowska

 
    Wanda Landowska (July 5, 1879 – August 16, 1959) was a Polish (later a naturalized French citizen) harpsichordist whose performances, teaching, recordings and writings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century. She was the first person to record Bach's Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord (1931).

Deeply interested in musicology, and particularly in the works of Bach, Couperin and Rameau, she toured the museums of Europe looking at original keyboard instruments; she acquired old instruments and had new ones made at her request by Pleyel and Company. These were large, heavily-built harpsichords with a 16-foot stop (a set of strings an octave below normal pitch) and owed much to piano construction. (These instruments have completely fallen out of fashion in the past four decades.)

Though Bach, Handel, and others had composed myriad harpsichord pieces, by 1900 virtually no one played the instrument and works written for it were generally transposed for piano. But Landowska was determined to play these works on the original instrument, despite discouragement from musicologists and fellow musicians.

 
         

         
 

Gustav Leonhardt

 
    Gustav Leonhardt (30 May 1928, Graveland, North Holland - 16 January 2012) is a highly renowned Dutch keyboard player, conductor, musicologist, teacher and editor.

Leonhardt has been a leader in the movement to perform music on period instruments. He has performed and recorded on the harpsichord, pipe organ, claviorganum (a combination of a harpsichord and an organ), clavichord and fortepiano.

Leonhardt has performed and conducted a variety of solo, chamber, orchestral, operatic, and choral music from the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods. He and Harnoncourt undertook the project of recording the first complete cycle of Bach's cantatas on period instruments; the two conductors divided up the cantatas and recorded their assigned cantatas with their own ensembles.

Leonhardt has had a significant influence on the technique and style of many harpsichordists of the second half of the 20th century, through his recordings, editions, and teaching.

 
         

         
 

Victor-Charles Mahillon

 
         
         

         
 

Felix Mendelssohn

 
    Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847),was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period.

In Germany he revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

 

 
         

         
 

Hermann A. Moëck

 
    Hermann Moëck founded in Celle the company 'Moeck Verlag und Musikinstrumentenwerk' in 1925, making recorders. In 1960 his son Dr. Hermann Alexander Moeck ( - 110 July 2010) took over the business.

In 1964, the company acquired the designs and rights to produce the entire range of historical woodwind instruments which had previously been developed and made by Otto Steinkopf in his own Berlin workshop since the early 1950s.

These instruments were produced in a separate historical department within the Moeck recorder factory, which produced an astonishing range of historical wind instruments: renaissance krummhorns, cornamuses, kortholts, rauschpfeifen, racketts, shawms, dulcians, cornetts, and serpents, plus baroque flutes, oboes, bassoons, racketts, and chalumeaux, and a classical clarinet.

Due to retirement, the historical workshop was closed at the end of 2008.

 
         

         
 

Christopher Monk

 
    Christopher Monk was an English maker of cornetts and serpents. Christopher Monk was amongst the first to make reconstructions of the cornett (since the early 1950’s). Monk made the instrument easily available to enthusiasts by manufacturing reliable reconstructions in resin which were (and continue to be) excellent instruments for getting started.

In the 1970s Christopher Monk began playing and later making Serpents.

Following Christopher Monk’s sudden death in 1991, the instrument making concern was taken over by Jeremy West. The workshops were relocated from rural England to new premises in London, and in partnership with craftsman Keith Rogers, instrument manufacture continues today.

 
         

         
 

Jeremy Montagu

 
    Jeremy Montagu is a world-famous authority on musical instruments world-wide who began playing percussion. He was curator of musical instruments at the Horniman Museum in 1960 and of the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments (1981-95) where some ten percent of his personal collection is on loan.

He began lecturing and teaching on musical instruments of the world and built up a major collection of instruments, world-wide and all periods from prehistoric to the present, for research and to illustrate those lectures and mounted exhibitions of instruments.

He has published many books and innumerable articles on instruments of all periods and cultures and has been Secretary of FoMRHI, the Fellowship of Makers and Researchers of Historical Musical Instruments from 1975 to 2000

At present he is the President of the Galpin Society, formed in October 1946 for the publication of original research into the history, construction, development and use of musical instruments. Its name commemorates the pioneer work of Canon Francis W. Galpin (1858-1945) who had spent a lifetime in the practical study of old instruments, in collecting them and recording their history.

Website of Jeremy Montagu

 
         

         
 

Reginald  Morley-Pegge

 
    Reginald Frederick Morley Pegge ('Morley', the name most used by his friends, was originally a Christian name which eventually mutated into his surname) was born in London on 17 January 1890.

His interest in brass instruments had begun in his prep school days presumably as a horn player.

In the 1930s he was invited to recatalogue the wind instruments in the collection of the Paris Conservatoire, a mark of the esteem in which his scholarship was already held.

During the World War II Morley-Pegge was in Edinburgh and was able to play with the Reid Orchestra, and began a close friendship with Lyndesay Langwill; their letters, which all survive, demonstrate their passionate enthusiasm for the history of brass and woodwind instruments, and, as with the Blandford-Morley-Pegge correspondence, gradually develop into intimacy.

Most of his collection, and all his papers, were secured for the Bate Collection; Philip Bate had been a friend since 1939, first by correspondence and then in person.

From its inception in 1946 Morley-Pegge was active in the Galpin Society, of which he was a founder-member.

 
         

         
 

David Munrow

 
    David John Munrow (Aug. 12 1942 - May 15 1976) did more than anyone else in the second half of the last century to popularise early music in Great Britain, despite a career lasting barely ten years. Munrow has even be regarded as the "inventor" of early music as a new movement per se. Of course, there were other musicians ploughing the same field. But it was David Munrow who helped to popularise it like no other in the 20th century.

David Munrow left behind him not only his recordings, but a large collection of musical instruments. Munrow's research into instruments and music of the past led to specially commissioned careful  reconstructions otherwise unobtainable antiquities from such instrumental families as the cornett, rackett, kortholt from makers such as Otto Steinkopf, Christopher Monk and Jonathan Askey.

Munrow and his future wife Gillian Reid began giving workshops and recitals on 'early music' to schools and music societies. In 1967 Munrow became a part-time lecturer at Leicester University in early music history with his wife Gillian Reid. The same year he founded the Early Music Consort of London with Christopher Hogwood and other friends.

In his hands and, largely through the Early Music Consort of London, the cornetto began to regain its former popularity.

Website dedicated to David Munrow, by David Griffith

 
         

         
 

Andres Mustonen

 
         
         

         
 

Richard Nicholson

 
         
         

         
 

Paul O'Dette

 
         
         

         
 

Kees Otten

 
         
         

         
 

Marco Pallis

 
         
         

         
 

Tevor Pinnock

 
         
         

         
 

Philip Pickett

 
    Philip Pickett (born 1950 in London, England) is a recorder player who began as a trumpet player. He met Anthony Baines and David Munrow who encouraged him to try early woodwind instruments such as the recorder, shawm and rackett.director and founder of early music ensembles, notably the world-renowned New London Consort and Musicians of the Globe.

Philip Pickett is considered one of today's most eminent advocates of period performance.

New London Consort, Philip Pickett's official site.

 
         

         
 

Michel Piguet

 
         
         

         
 

Diana Poulton

 
    Diana Poulton (18 April 1903 - 15 December 1995) was an English lutenist and musicologist, co-founder (with Ian Harwood) of the Lute Society in 1956, biographer of John Dowland (1563–1626) and editor of his complete works for lute.

She studied Fine Arts from 1919 to 1923, but was spirited away from the visual arts when she began to accompany her mother to Arnold Dolmetsch’s recitals in London. She was entranced by the sound of the lute and determined to learn to play it herself. She became Arnold’s first lute student. Her three years lessons with him (a very irascible teacher) were not happy. Then, she continued her researches into original sources at the British Museum, encouraged to do so by Rudolph, Arnold’s mild-mannered and brilliant son.

 A leading member of the 20th century’s revival of the popularity of the lute and its music. For many years she was the only professional lute-player in England, making over 400 broadcasts for the BBC, giving recitals all over the country and providing regularly lute music for performances of Shakespeare's plays.

 
         

         
 

Peter Reidemeister

 
         
         

         
 

Denise Restout

 
         
         

         
 

Anthony Rooley

 
         
         

         
 

Konrad Ruhland

 
         
         

         
 

Paul Sacher

 
    Paul Sacher, (Basel, Switzerland April 28, 1906 - May 26, 1999), was a orchestra conductor and musical philanthropist.

In 1926 Paul Sacher founded the Basel Chamber Orchestra (=Basler Kammerorchester) to which was added the Basle Chamber Choir in 1928; the purpose of both was to perform music written before the classical period and modern works.

In 1933 he became the director of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, a teaching and research institute for early music which he founded in Basle.

En este campo, Sacher fue un precursor de los criterios historicistas hoy dominantes en la interpretación de la música de esa época, al propugnar "una nueva simplicidad, una vuelta a los orígenes", rechazando frontalmente las formas interpretativas consagradas en su tiempo y que acomodaban la música antigua a fórmulas propias del s.XIX.

Sacher was an efficient if slightly reserved conductor, whose readings were nonetheless always stylish. His discography was not large and reflected his antipathy to nineteenth-century music, concentrating instead on the music of eighteenth- and twentieth-century composers.

 
         

         
 

Michel Sanvoisin

 
         
         

         
 

Jordi Savall

 
    Jordi Savall i Bernadet (born 1941 in Catalonia, Spain) is a viol player, conductor, and composer. He has been one of the major figures in the field of early music since the 1970s, largely responsible for bringing the viol (viola da gamba) back to life on the stage.

His repertory ranges from Medieval to Renaissance and Baroque music.

Alia-vox.com, Jordi Savall's official website.

 
         

         
 

Albert Schweitzer

 
         
         

         
 

Martin Skowroneck

 
         
         

         
 

Otto Steinkopf

 
    Otto Steinkopf (Stolberg, 28 June 1904 - Celle, 17 Feb 1980) is considered the pioneer of the revival of historical woodwind instruments in Germany.

Originally a bassoonist and a saxophonist (Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Berlin Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonic and Radio Symphony Orchestras; later particularly Cappella Coloniensis), he restored in 1950 the woodwind instruments of the Berlin collection of musical instruments and then started his own workshop in Berlin in which he also reproduced many woodwind instruments of the Renaissance and Baroque periods (crumhorns, cornamuses, kortholtes, ranketts, dulcianes, shawms, cornetts, baroque oboes and bassoons, transverse flutes, chalumeaux and others).

In 1964 Otto Steinkopf sold to Moeck Verlag und Musikinstrumentenwerk the designs and rights to produce the entire range of historical woodwind instruments. Otto Steinkopf remained on as a part-time advisor to the Moeck workshop throughout the rest of the decade, but gradually withdrew from day to day management into retirement in the early 1970s.

 
         

         
 

Christopher Stembridge

 
    Christopher Stembridge studied languages at Cambridge University and musicology at Oxford University. He was awarded the Turpin Prize on obtaining Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists.

After 20 years as a lecturer in music at University College Cork (National University of Ireland), he moved to Northern Italy where he now lives. He gives regular master-classes on Renaissance organs and travels widely giving lectures, recitals and seminars in European, Russian and North American universities and conservatoires. For ten years he was Professor of Organ and Harpsichord at the Scuola di Musica Santa Cecilia, Brescia

Christopher Stembridge's official site

 
         

         
 

Melvyn Tan

 
         
         

         
 

Charles Toet

 
    Charles Toet was born in 1951 in the Hague. He received his musical training at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, where he studied modern trombone and where he began to specialize in early music and baroque trombone, which he now teaches at the same institution as well as at the Schola Cantorum Basliensis (Basel) and the Musikhochschule in Trossingen (Germany). He currently divides his energies between the seventeenth century (mostly with Concerto Palatino of which he is the co-founder) and the Classical and early Romantic repertoires, played on original instruments with such period orchestras as La Petite Bande (Sigiswald Kuijken), The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (Ton Koopman), and the Orchestra des Champs-Elysées (Philippe Herreweghe).

He has performed and recorded extensively with Bruce Dickey and Concerto Palatino and with numerous other ensembles of particular importance to the history of early music, including, in addition to the ones mentioned above, Syntagma Musicum of Amsterdam, The Taverner Players of London, the Hilliard Ensemble, Hespérion XX, and the vocal ensemble Currende.

 
         

         
 

Auguste Tolbecque

 
    Auguste Tolbecque (March 30, 1830 – March 8, 1919) was a French cellist who composed a number of etudes for his instrument.

In addition to his career as a professional cellist, Tolbecque built and constructed a number of historical instruments, and would often perform works on viola da gamba during his recitals. Many of his instruments were acquired for the collection of the Brussels Conservatoire (now the Musical Instrument Museum) in 1879.

 
         

         
 

James Tyler

 
         
         

         
 

Guillaume de Van

 
         
         

         
 

Rainer Weber

 
      German restorer and maker of historical wind instruments. He for instance restored the dulcians of the Maximilianmuseum in Augsburg, Germany.  
         

         
 

August Wenzinger

 
    August Wenzinger (1905–1996) was a prominent cellist, viol player, conductor, teacher, and music scholar from Basel, Switzerland. He was a pioneer of historically informed performance, both as a master of the viola da gamba and as a conductor of Baroque orchestral music and operas.

By 1925 Wenzinger had mastered the viola da gamba, an instrument then usually considered obsolete. He joined the Kabeler Kammermusik (Kabel Chamber Music), a circle of musicians interested in authentic Baroque performance, sponsored by paper manufacturer Hans Eberhard Hoesch in Hagen, Germany. In 1930 he and flautist Gustav Scheck also founded the Kammermusikkreis Scheck-Wenziger (Scheck-Wenzinger Chamber Music Circle), considered the leading early music ensemble until the 1950s.

 
         

         
 

Jeremy West

 
    Jeremy West is an evangelist for the cornett, the often-overlooked wind instrument which was held in the highest possible regard during the 16th and 17th centuries. He continues to play a lead role in re-establishing this instrument as a recognised and accepted virtuoso and ensemble instrument. Jeremy has on several occasions been acclaimed a “pioneer” of his instrument.

In addition to a playing career, since 1991 Jeremy has directed the instrument-making workshops of the late Christopher Monk. The workshops are devoted to the research, development, reproduction and distribution of all instruments in the cornett and serpent families.

 
         

         
     
         
         

 

 

 

     

Copyright © 1999 Renaissance Workshop Company Ltd.
Last modification: 03 de mayo de 2019
Phone:(+34) 91 450 30 50
info[@]renwks[.]com