Gala Concert: 40 Years of Early Music in Bremen

You are warmly invited to a gala concert to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Akademie für Alte Musik Bremen on Monday 12 October at 7.00 pm at the Galerie (Dechanatstraße).

Admission is free. After the concert, there will be an opportunity to chat over a drink.

Students and lecturers from the Institute for Early Music and Performance Practice are performing early Baroque works from the repertoire of the Warsaw Court Orchestra.

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Building on Bremen’s long tradition of engaging with cultural policy issues – and of researching how music functions within the context of its origins – through previous initiatives by the ‘Gesellschaft für Norddeutsche Musikpflege’ and the ‘Forum für Alte Musik’ (which had its headquarters in Villa Ichon), Thomas Albert established a new programme of study in early music in Bremen, modelled on existing institutions such as the Schola Cantorum in Basel and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. Thanks to the reputation Bremen had already earned at that time as an open and experimental city of music – the ‘pro musica antiqua’ and ‘pro musica nova’ concert series curated by Radio Bremen were world-famous – it was possible to assemble an international team of lecturers comprising outstanding specialists, which attracted a host of eager students to Bremen from the very first year. When music education in Bremen was reorganised in 1994, it was again through Thomas Albert’s initiative that the Academy was successfully integrated into the merger of the University of the Arts and the Conservatoire, thereby raising the standard of music education in the city of Bremen to an international level.

Today, the Academy of Early Music continues as the Institute for Early Music and Performance Practice at the University of the Arts Bremen.