String Chamber Music of the Classical German School, 1840-1900:
A Scholarly Investigation through Reconstructive Performance 

A three-year project, hosted by Leeds University (2006-9), funded by the AHRC.

This folio comprises a set of study recordings and related articles, building on knowledge of nineteenth-century string performing practices of the ‘classical’ German school.

These performing practices were espoused by Louis Spohr, musicians based in Leipzig at the time of Mendelssohn, and Joseph Joachim and his protégés, who represented perhaps the final flowering of this tradition, before it fell into relative obscurity during the first part of the twentieth century.

On this page are two substantial articles - on Joachim and Soldat-Roeger - as well as all of the project's supporting documents.

These archive pages contain links to each work studied and recorded. Each work's page contains a recording of my own performance, along with analysis of historical renditions and (annotated) scans of relevant editions. For some works, there are also graphs plotting tempo flexibility from analysis of historical and new recordings using the Sonic Visualiser program.

Frequent references are made to my own previous text, Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth Century String Performance (Aldershot, 2003) which provides further scholarly substantiation of this research-based performance project. Clive Brown’s seminal text, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900 (Oxford, 1999) provides the detailed scholarly background informing this project. Ideally, these texts should be viewed in conjunction with this project archive.