Friedemann Hellwig receives 2025 Curt Sachs Award

Friedemann Hellwig

The Board of Governors of the American Musical Instrument Society has named Friedemann Hellwig as the 2025 Recipient of the Curt Sachs Award, honoring lifetime contributions toward the goals of the Society. The nominating committee unanimously recommended Professor Hellwig for his outstanding contributions in organology, connoisseurship, museology, education and, most significantly, musical instrument conservation. He has published widely in those areas. With his wife, art historian Dr. Barbara Hellwig, he has extended research begun by his father, luthier and scholar Günther Hellwig, on the late seventeenth-century luthier Joachim Tielke.

Hellwig was conservator of musical instruments at the German National Museum in Nuremberg, and he chaired CIMCIM (now ICOM-MUSIC) during 1977–1983, a period of significant growth for that committee. He was professor of wooden-objects conservation at Cologne’s University of Applied Sciences from 1988 until his retirement in 2003. After a collaboration beginning in 1993 between the university and the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Professor Hellwig and his wife continued to support preservation efforts there and research on Jewish history in Hamburg. Together, they continue their work on Joachim Tielke through research and publications.

Curt Sachs Awards committee: John Watson (chair), Aurelia Hartenberger, Laurence Libin