What is the Moravian Music Foundation?

What is the Moravian Music Foundation?

The Moravian Music Foundation was founded and chartered in North Carolina in 1956, to preserve, study, edit and publish the music retained in the Archives of the Moravian Church in America, Northern and Southern Provinces.

The Moravian Music Foundation preserves, shares and celebrates Moravian musical culture.

Since its establishment, the Foundation has acquired many additional items, including the Irving Lowens Collection of early American tunebooks; the band books of the 26th North Carolina Regimental Band (from the Civil War); and a reference library of over 6,000 volumes, specializing in Protestant church music and American music history.

More detailed organizational overview

The Moravian Music Foundation is responsible for many first modern-day performances of music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Foundation serves as a resource for scholars, performers, and students worldwide as well as for church musicians. Over 40 orchestral works from the Foundation’s holdings have been edited and placed in the Fleisher Collection of the Philadelphia (PA) Free Library.

The collections of the Moravian Music Foundation contain some 10,000 manuscripts and early imprints of vocal and instrumental music, sacred and secular, from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. Not all of this was written by Moravian composers, but it is all music which the Moravians used and enjoyed. Included in the collections of the Moravian Music Foundation are works by Haydn and Mozart, J. C. Bach, Abel, Johann Stamitz, and a host of lesser-known composers. A number of these are the only known copies in the world. The Moravian collections, then, provide a cross-section of classical musical culture, placing the masters in their proper historical perspective.