florida state university college of music performance practice

a purpose of “documenting…the rediscovery and innovative interpretation of early music
by the great performers of the day.” 96 The first director of the Archiv label was
musicologist Fred Hamel who had a vision that the label would “document German
musical monuments.” 97
Hamel had studied with Arnold Schering and Friedrich Blume and had used his
position early on at Archiv to promote recording works “in their complete authentic
form” and “using specialist performers playing period instruments whenever possible.” 98
These revolutionary efforts were short lived after Hamel‟s successor Hans Hickmann
abandoned such efforts and made early music marketed on the Archiv label only such
that the repertoire was early but not necessarily the performance style of the artists
recorded. 99
Activity in performance practice and early music after the Second World War
seemed to shift stage from primarily a German monopoly to one that was spreading
inside and outside the continent, particularly in London and Amsterdam. 100 Scholar
Dorottya Fabian describes the movement moving in two different spheres. She
generalizes that the movement was usually approached either in a pragmatic/practical
approach in English-speaking countries or in a theoretical/empirical approach in German-
speaking countries. 101
The 1950s witnessed a fury of profuse and significant publications and events
regarding early music and performance practice. This decade began a thirty-year (1950-
1980) venture in attempting to gather and communicate factual information concerning
early music and performance practice. 102 Explanation and interpretation was typically
absent from this approach; rather a laundry list of rules and specific details gleaned from
treatises were circulated in interested circles. The influx of copious information
concerning early music and performance practice can be blamed for countless individuals
mistakenly crediting the middle of the century as the initial stages of inquisitiveness
96
Deutsche Grammophone, “Arkiv Produktion.” http://www.deutschegrammophon.com (accessed October
20, 2007).
97
Fabian, Bach Performance Practice, 1945-1975, 33.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid.
100
Lawson and Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music, 12.
101
Fabian, Bach Performance Practice, 16.
102
Fabian Somorjay, “Musicology and Performance Practice,” 81.
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