Musical instrument studies

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Aerophone (piccolo trumpet, "standard" Bb trumpet and bass trumpet)

Instrument science , also organology , is a subject area of musicology that uses natural and humanities methods to research, document and teach about musical instruments . As an academic subject, Kunde refers to the collection of descriptions ( organography ) of instruments, their playing styles, their development over time and all attempts at classification .

Instrumentology includes all historical and modern (recent) musical instruments, both those of the European art music tradition, folk and popular music as well as all modern and old sound-producing instruments from non-European musical traditions. The latter is also known as ethno-organology .

The focus and research methods are diverse. The teaching of the use of instruments in compositions and arrangements (the instrumentation ) is called instrumentation or instrumentation. In overlapping with the musical acoustics , the structure and the resulting sound properties are examined in technical instrument science. Organologists are mainly active in musical instrument museums , music colleges and universities. Many manufacturers of musical instruments also do research.

History and systematics

Already in the 2nd millennium BC The Chinese classified the instruments according to the material used. (Stone, bamboo, silk etc.). In the European Middle Ages there was a division according to the type of music genre (with / without singing, for dancing, etc.). In modern times, the type of sound generation was already subdivided, but systematically inconsistent. ( Wind instruments , string instruments , plucked instruments ...) see also instrument families .

The Hornbostel-Sachs system used worldwide to this day comes from Erich Moritz von Hornbostel from Vienna and Curt Sachs from Berlin , who worked on the " collection of old musical instruments at the Berlin State University of Music ". You yourself described it as an attempt to bring the musical instruments existing worldwide into one system. It was published in 1914 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. It is fundamentally based on the system developed by Victor-Charles Mahillon , curator of the Museum of the Brussels Conservatory , from 1888. In 1940, Sachs added the electrophone group. The main groups of the Hornbostel-Sachs system are mainly based on the type of tone generation, the tone generator (oscillator), but for the group of chordophones on the shape of the resonance body and the arrangement of the strings. The Hornbostel-Sachs system was significantly differentiated into subgroups in 2011 through the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) project, with a fourth main group for the actual wind instruments ( membranopipes ) being added.

  1. Idiophones
    1. Stroke idiophones
    2. Plucked idiophones
    3. Friction idiophones
    4. Blow idiophones
  2. Membranophones
    1. Beating drums
    2. Plucking drums
    3. Friction drums
    4. Singing drums ( Mirlitone )
  3. Chordophones
    1. Simple chordophones or zithers
    2. Composite chordophones
  4. Aerophones
    1. Free aerophones
    2. (Actual) wind instruments
  5. Electrophones
    1. Electromechanical musical instruments
    2. Electronic musical instruments
    3. Digital musical instruments

Herbert Heyde's approaches to a “natural system of musical instruments” are particularly important for ethnomusicology . Since digitization, virtual musical instruments have also been part of research.

literature

  • Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014
  • Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments. Harper & Row, New York 1975
  • John Henry van der Meer : Instrumentology. In: Music in Past and Present (MGG), Part 4, Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel / Stuttgart 1996, Sp. 951–970, ISBN 3761811055
  • Curt Sachs : Reallexicon of musical instruments. Berlin 1913 ( digitized version ).
  • Curt Sachs: Handbook of Musical Instruments. Breitkopf and Härtel, Wiesbaden 1930.
  • Erich Valentin : Handbook of musical instrument science. Bosse, Regensburg 1954 and 2004.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Henry van der Meer: Instrumentology . In: Bärenreiter / Metzler (Hrsg.): Music in past and present (MGG) . 4 ,, Kassel / Basel, 1996, pp. 951-970. ISBN 3761811055 .
  2. ^ Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Macmillan, London 1984; Hans Fischer: Sound devices in Oceania. Construction and play technique - distribution and function. (= Collection of Musicological Treatises , Volume 36). Heitz, Strasbourg 1958.
  3. ↑ Erich M. von Hornbostel, Curt Sachs: Systematics of musical instruments. One try. In: Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 46, 1914, pp. 553-590 ( digitized version ).