Sibyl Marcuse

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Sibyl Marcuse (born February 13, 1911 in Frankfurt am Main , † March 5, 2003 in Berkeley , California ) was an American musical instrument scholar and museum curator . Her Lexicon of Musical Instruments ( Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary ), first published in 1964, and a book on the history of western musical instruments ( A Survey of Musical Instruments ) from 1975 became frequently cited standard works.

Life

The mother of Sibyl Marcuse, who was born in Frankfurt, came from England and her father was Swiss. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the family moved to Oxford , England. In 1920 the family returned to Frankfurt and then settled in different places in Europe for a short time. Encouraged by the frequent change of school and with her talent for languages, the young person learned several European languages. She trained as a librarian in Brussels . This was the only formal educational qualification, an extensive general education and the instrumental specialist knowledge Marcuse acquired autodidactically.

After marrying a Belgian journalist, whose surname was Marcuse from then on and with whom she lived in China from 1932 to 1935, she traveled to South America for a few years. As in China, where she left the colony of western foreigners in Shanghai to set out on her own for Manchuria and other inland regions, she was constantly traveling in the countries of South America. When World War II broke out, Marcuse emigrated to the United States and was granted American citizenship in 1945.

In New York she worked in various positions for several aid organizations. Her language skills proved extremely useful in helping the newly arrived war refugees. When the number of refugees fell, she took lessons in a school for piano tuners . With this quickly acquired skill he worked for several years in the summer months as assistant to harpsichord and clavichord maker John Challis (1907–1974) in Detroit and worked in the harpsichord workshop of Hugh Gough (1916–1997) in London . From 1950, Marcuse gained a reputation as an independent piano and harpsichord tuner in New York. She regularly tuned Wanda Landowska's harpsichord , who played a technically sophisticated instrument made by the Pleyel company . From 1953 to 1960, Marcuse was the curator of the Yale University musical instrument collection . During this time she organized the relocation of the collection to new, larger rooms and, in addition to several articles and lists of instruments, published an exhibition catalog in 1960. She bought some historical musical instruments for Yale University, including a Taskin -embalo from 1774. During the summer months Marcuse went on study trips to Europe and deepened her knowledge of musical instruments.

Marcuse was invited by the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Musical Instruments (CIMCIM), an international organization founded in 1960 to ensure the proper presentation and conservation of musical instruments in museums and other collections, together with Alfred Berner (State Institute for Musikforschung, Berlin), Henrik Glahn (1919–2006, musicologist at the University of Copenhagen) and Wladimir Kaminski ( Posen ) to form a working group to develop internationally valid guidelines for musical instrument collections. After numerous other collections from Asia and Africa had joined, the guide was only published in 1977 by a differently composed working group.

After leaving Yale University in 1960, Marcuse lived mostly in New York for the next few years. As a result of her research and travel, she published Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary in 1964 . In 1971 she stayed in Oxford for a few months, where she met the English musical instrument expert Anthony Baines (1912–1997) and the harpsichord experts, Donald Boalch (1914–1999) and Howard Schott (1923–2005). Marcuse made his way from Oxford to Basel in Switzerland. There she studied ancient Greek musical instruments in the 1970s. The manuscripts on this have not yet been published. Her Swiss citizenship, which she still had from her father, made her longer stay in Switzerland possible. Marcuse received the 1984 Curt Sachs Award from the American Musical Instrument Society , an annual award given to those who have made significant contributions to the Society's goals. The following year, Anthony Baines received the award. Marcuse spent the last years of his life in San Francisco . She died on the other side of the bay at the age of 92 in a Berkeley retirement home.

effect

The musical instrument encyclopedia ( Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary ) from 1964 gives, on 600 pages, a concise overview of a good part of the instruments mentioned in music historical and music ethnological literature from the middle of the 18th century to the first half of the 20th century from all times and all parts of the world. Around 200 publications in English, German, French and Italian were evaluated. Even if some entries only consist of a few words, in most cases a number is given that refers to the bibliography. The easy availability of otherwise often difficult to access information made the lexicon a widely used standard work. Marcuse emphasized immediately after publication, however, that the lexicon could not be remotely complete, that there were over 5000 books and articles on non-Western instruments and folk musical instruments alone. The mention of numerous “exotic” instrument names was criticized by some, but made Marcuse's dictionary unique in its universality. A comparable spectrum was only covered by the three volumes of the New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments published in 1984 .

The essential basis for Marcuse's lexicon is the Reallexicon der Musikinstrumenten (Berlin, 1913) by Curt Sachs , whose musical instrument classification in the Hornbostel-Sachs system is in the lexicon in terms that are unfamiliar to the English-speaking general reader (such as " idiophone ") and in her work A Survey of Musical Instruments (1975) faithfully adopts the structure. In the latter, on 860 pages, it deals mainly with instruments of Western culture and focuses on their historical development. The chapter division follows the four main groups of the Hornbostel-Sachs system. This was not very well known in the United States at the time, which is why the lack of an introductory explanation was criticized.

Publications

  • Transposing Keyboards on Extant Flemish Harpsichords . In: The Musical Quarterly , Vol. 38, No. 3, July 1952, pp. 414-425
  • Musical Instruments at Yale. A Selection of Western Instruments from the Fifteenth to Twentieth Centuries. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, undated (exhibition catalog, 1960)
  • The Instruments of the King's Library at Versailles . In: The Galpin Society Journal , Vol. 14, March 1961, pp. 34-36
  • Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary. A complete, authoritative encyclopedia of instruments throughout the world. Doubleday, New York 1964 (Country Life Limited, London 1966; improved new edition: The Norton Library, WW Norton & Company Inc., New York 1975)
  • A Survey of Musical Instruments . Harper & Row Inc., New York 1975

literature

  • Howard Schott: Marcuse, Sibyl . In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments . Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 395
  • Howard Schott: Marcuse, Sibyl . In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . Vol. 15. Macmillan Publishers, London 2001, p. 832
  • Howard Schott: In Memoriam Sibyl Marcuse. In: Newsletter of the American Musical Instrument Society , Vol. 32, No. 3, November 2003, pp. 15f
  • Marcuse, Sibyl . In: Charles Hiroshi Garrett (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of American Music. 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press, New York 2013
  • Sibyl Marcuse (1911-2003). In: Mervyn McLean: Pioneers of Ethnomusicology. Llumina Press, Coral Springs 2006, p. 199

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ What is CIMCIM? International Committee for Museums and Collections of Musical Instruments
  2. ^ History of CIMCIM. International Committee for Museums and Collections of Musical Instruments
  3. ^ Newsletter of the American Musical Instrument Society , Vol. 14, No. 2, June 1985, p. 3
  4. ^ Because of the application as a "complete and authoritative record" in the blurb
  5. ^ Paul S. Ivory: Review of Musical Instruments: A Comprehensive Dictionary. In: Journal of Research in Music Education , Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 1965, p. 126
  6. ^ JAW: Review: Musical Instruments. A Comprehensive Dictionary. In: Music & Letters, Vol. 48, No. 2, April 1967, pp. 145-148, here p. 146
  7. ↑ John Henry van der Meer : Older and more recent literature on musical instruments. In: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 51, Fasc. 1, January – June 1979, pp. 1-50, here p. 18
  8. ^ Peter Williams: Review: Guide to Instruments . In: The Musical Times, Vol. 108, No. 1488, February 1967, p. 138
  9. ^ Burt Feintuch: Review of A Survey of Musical Instruments . In: Keystone Folklore, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1976, pp. 30f
personal data
SURNAME Marcuse, Sibyl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American musical instrument scholar and museum curator
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 2003
Place of death Berkeley