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SHLOMO PESTCOE שלמה פּסטקאָ
* Yummie * Musical Styles * Instruments * Features * News * Contact * Links * * Banjo Roots: Banjo Beginnings * * The Ekonting: A Link to the Banjo's West African Heritage * Please note: This is not a commercial site. I do not sell or appraise musical instruments. Please do not contact me to request that I identify and provide background information on a specific instrument in your possession and/or evaluate its worth. That's a job for an accredited professional appraiser, which I'm not. That said, I'll be glad to answer questions and discuss any subject I present here, so long as that one proviso is respected.
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Calling a Fiddle a Lute: The Hornbostel-Sachs
System for the Classification of Musical Instruments Since the dawn of musical culture, the sheer of variety of instruments used to make music has been bewilderingly immense. The incredible diversity of musical instruments found the world over, in terms of differing type, function, size and shape, is, to say the least, staggering. And when you take into consideration the fact that the name of each and every instrument may vary from place to place, people to people, musician to musician, the study and documentation of musical instruments can be exercises in frustration. Back in 1914, pioneering Austrian ethnomusicologist Erich M. Von Hornbostel (1877-1935) and German musicologist Curt Sachs (1881-1959) made a stab at addressing this problem by creating a comprehensive system of classification "for all musicologists, ethnologists, and curators of ethnological collections and those of cultural history." Today, the Hornbostel- Sachs system is the standard for organology, the science of musical instruments. In the introduction to their article Systematik der Musikinstrumente (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1914), Hornbostel and Sachs recognized that instruments "are alive and dynamic, indifferent to sharp demarcation and set form, while systems are static and depend upon sharply drawn demarcations and categories." "These considerations bring special difficulties to the classifier, though also an attractive challenge: his aim must be to develop and refine his concepts so that they better and better fit the reality of his material, sharpen his perception, and enable him to place a specific case in scheme quickly and securely.... A system of classification has theoretical advantages as well as practical ones. Objects which otherwise appear to be quite unrelated to each other may now become associated, revealing new genetic and cultural links. Herein will always be found the leading test of the validity of the criteria upon which the system is based.... All these considerations have persuaded us to undertake afresh the attempt to classify musical instruments.... We are aware that with increasing knowledge, especially of extra-European forms, new difficulties in the way of a consistent classification will constantly arise. It would thus seem impossible to plan a system today which would not require future development and amendment." At the time, most scholars and museum curators used the Mahillon classification system, devised in 1881 by leading Belgian acoustician Victor-Charles Mahillon (1841-1924) to catalog the instruments in the collection of the Museum of the Brussels Conservatoire. Mahillon was one of the first organologists to classify instruments according to their fundamental sound-producing elements. His system divided them into four main categories: self-sounders, membrane instruments, string instruments, and wind instruments. However, one of the main limitations of Mahillon's system was that it was predicated on the instruments he knew best-- those of the Western European "modern" orchestra of his day. The system pretty much broke down when it came to the issue of how to classify the myriad folk instruments and non-European instruments in general. Hornbostel and Sachs proposed a more flexible modular framework that would allow for "open-ended discussion" and future updating. Picking up where Mahillon left off, they developed a new revolutionary approach utilizing the Dewey Decimal Classification system, which was introduced in 1876 by the American library science innovator Melvil Dewey (1851-1931). The Hornbostel-Sachs system is divided into the following principal categories:
1. Idiophones (What Mahillon classified as "self-sounders," instruments which produce sound
2. Membranophones (Instruments which have as their main sounding element a taut membrane, such as
the head
3. Chordophones (String Instruments) Subsequently, mechanical and electrical instrument categories have been added. -- Shlomo Pestcoe
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* Yummie * Musical Styles * Instruments * Features * News * Contact * Links * * Banjo Roots: Banjo Beginnings ** The Ekonting: A Link to the Banjo's West African Heritage * Please s end mail to info@shlomomusic.com with questions or comments about this web site.Copyright © 2005 Shlomo Pestcoe. All rights reserved. Last modified: 02/01/09
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