Heinrich Grünfeld Project
The most vivid insights into historical performance practices often emerge through auditory evidence. In my current cello practice,
I am investigating the playing style and technique of
Heinrich Grünfeld (1855–1931), one of the Brahms circle cellists.
By emulating and embodying techniques heard in his early twentieth-century recordings, I aim to reconstruct his approach to the cello, gaining valuable insights into phrasing, portamento, vibrato, bowing techniques, and tempo flexibility.
As one of the earliest cellists to be captured on sound recordings, Grünfeld’s style offers a rare auditory link to performance traditions a century prior to my own generation. His playing not only reflects the practices of his contemporaries but may also preserve interpretative conventions from an even earlier era.
Mechanical Instrument Digitisation Project
Nothing could be more important to the musicians of today, than to hear recordings (or closely mimicking automations of performance) by eighteenths-century musicians.
Especially when those recordings come with the following statement by the well known and trusted lexicographer Ernst Ludwig Gerber:
“Those clocks which I saw and heard at Mr. Kleemeyer's workshop in 1797 played in a way which left nothing to be desired. Since the Berliners know how to bring so much life into this inanimate, mechanical musician, these clocks would be useful for the history of taste in music for future times, by communicating the manner prevailing in our age to the ears of future generations.” - Neues Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (1813)
Through studying the Flötenuhren (Organ Clocks) built by Christan Ernst Kleemeyer (1739-1799) in the 1790s I am reconstructing interpretations pinned into the barrels of these mechanical instruments, including works of Mozart, Haydn and Pleyel, so that we may understand late eighteenth-century use of ornamentation, tempo, and articulation practices.
Galant Schema Studies
Galant Schema Studies is an initiative of Jonathan Salamon and Alexander Nicholls. As performers and schema theorists their aim is to bring the two worlds of performance and theory into one, to create historically informed performances and compositions. For more information please visit: www.galantschemastudies.com
