[1] The first use of the expression "Wiener Klangstil" was in 1966 in a letter from Dr. Hans Sittner, the former president of the Vienna Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Academy of Music and Performing Arts) to the Federal ministry recommending the formation of six new scientific institutes for the academic year 1966/67.
A letter from the director to the academic board in 1971 defined for the first time the objectives of the institute, namely: to establish the fundamental principles of the Wiener Klangstil.
In 1973 Dr. Hadamovsky issued privately a three-volume, handwritten work on "Der Wiener Bläserstil", which for the first time gave both description and definition of the contemporary Viennese playing tradition, though very subjective and based on contestable science.
Playing in a chamber music style and drawing on the Bohemian, Czech and Russian schools are also key features of the Viennese string sound.
The clarinet and bassoon are slight modifications to German designs, and only in the case of the flute did players, around 1930, gradually switch to the universally used Böhm model.
Because variety of tone colour was considered paramount, the double horn, though easier to play and more secure, was not adopted by the Viennese orchestras.
In 2002 M. Bertsch, with the participation around the world of over a thousand test persons, published the first scientific and statistically robust evidence to support the claim for a “Vienna sound style”.
[8] The task was a blind test to recognize the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra using commercial CDs of the Vienna, Berlin and New York Philharmonic Orchestras with examples played to some 1,000 persons including non-playing listeners, amateur musicians, professional orchestral musicians and soloists, sound engineers, university music students and top international conductors, some of whom, like Zubin Mehta and Seiji Ozawa, were represented on the discs chosen.