ABSTRACT
Awareness of the Berlin School has grown less dramatically, and remains somewhat restricted to the German speaking countries, as it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fortunately music itself is an international language, and music publishers have greatly improved the availability of Berlin School gamba music in recent years. However, some of the most interesting works have still not been published; some of the publications have relied on only one of several sources, or carry what has since been shown to be the wrong composer's name. The discovery of the Berlin School's awareness of itself as an entity, its commonality of purpose and the resulting unified corpus of viola da gamba music which is different from all other gamba repertoire has been a revelation for the author. The efforts of the early music movement over about three decades have changed our thinking.
