It is with great sadness that we announce the death by natural causes of founding member Martha Bixler at the age of 93. Martha has been a key figure in the growth of the American recorder and early music movement since the 1950s.
She held Bachelor degrees from Smith College and the Yale University School of Music and a Master's degree from Brooklyn College. She has long been active with the American Recorder Society (ARS). She was a member of the Board of Directors, twice President of the organization, editor of the Members' Library Editions and active on various committees. Her personal story of the first fifty years of the American Recorder Society, The American Recorder Society and Me; a Memoir, is available on the ARS web site.
She taught recorder, harpsichord and early dance at various colleges including Wagner College and Sarah Lawrence College, as well as at innumerable recorder and early music workshops around the United States, Canada, England and Ireland. As a performer, she played with a number of prominent early music ensembles including the New York Pro Musica, Musica Sacra, the Bach Aria Group and the Berkshire Bach Society.
She was the editor of a number of arrangements for recorders and recorded for Columbia Records and Decca Gold Label.
She also enjoyed playing viol and sackbut and was a regular participant at our Historic Brass Festivals. She, along with her good friends Susan Wilcox and Charlotte Leonard, were known at the annual Historic Brass Festivals as the "Sackbut Sisters".
Click on the title of this article to read the full version including some memories of Martha by the two remaining "Sackbut Sisters".
Jeremy Peter Samuel Montagu (1927-2020), one of the foremost authorities on musical instruments of our time, has died peacefully surrounded by family following a short period of illness. Like the extensive collection of musical instruments and the library that he amassed in his Oxford home, Montagu’s multifaceted career as a scholar, author, musician, and curator was notable for its global purview and interdisciplinary breadth.
Edward H. Tarr (1936–2020), the pre-eminent baroque trumpeter of the twentieth century, has died at 83 following a period of illness. Tarr’s long career as a brilliant and expressive performer, a tireless scholar, and devoted teacher was of enormous influence in shaping the revival of historic brass instruments. His recordings and concerts stimulated considerable interest in the natural trumpet, an interest that he furthered with numerous editions of trumpet works, a rich body of pedagogical and musicological publication, and close work with the instrument makers Ewald Meinl and Rainer Egger in the reconstruction of instruments inspired by Wolf Wilhelm Haas, Hans Hainlein, and Johann Leonhard Ehe III. But crowning all of this was his beauty of sound and a highly cultivated sense of style that would entice and inspire generations of players and listeners throughout the world.
