German multi-instrumentalist and musical instrument maker, who was an employee of the Munich magazine Der Gitarrenfreund in the 1920s.
Peter Harlan come from an artistic family. He was the son of writer Walter Harlan and brother of film director Veit Harlan (Jud Süß).
Harlan too up an apprenticeship as a string instrument maker with Ernst Wilhelm Kunze and later founded his own workshop for the construction of medieval instruments in the musical instrument region of Markneukirchen, Vogtlandkreis, Germany. In the 1920s Harlan was introduced to recorders by Wilibald Gurlitt at Freiburg im Breisgau. Harlan later stated that he had built the first recorder in 1921.
In 1926 he had a recorder built by other wind instrument makers. The result of these attempts was the still familiar German fingering recorder, which became an easy and fast-to-learn instrument. Both well-known songs as well as classical repertoire could be played. This “Bärenreiter-Blockföte” from the “Harlan workshops” spread rapidly due to its low price of just four Reichsmark.
Inspired by Gurlitt, Harlan developed not only recorders but also fiddles, viols and clavichords based on historical models.
Together with musicologist Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach and violist and composer Hanning Schröder, in 1930 he founded the Harlan Trio, pioneers in the field of historical performance practice with music from the Middle Ages to the Baroque.
In World War II he was Air Force Officer and in December 1944 was in command of Castle Sternberg (de) in the Lippe district. In the last days of the war in 1945, he refused the order to destroy the castle by means of a few barrels of gasoline and waited for the invasion of the Allied troops in Lemgo, so that the castle fell into their hands without a fight.
In 1947, Harlan leased Sternberg Castle, resumed building instruments there and built the castle into an important training centre for German music. Until his death, he allowed countless children to take their first steps in the field of music by playing, building their own or buying simple musical instruments.
After Harlan’s death on 13 January 1966, his sons Till and Klaus Harlan continued their father’s work at Sternberg Castle.
Link to Wikipedia biography