In 1996, a group of percussion and brass instruments owned and used by Andrew Shivas (1922-1996) was given to the Collection by his widow, Isabel Shivas. The Collection was also given instruments by Professor Geoffrey Samuel and Mr Ted Baldwin.
The cataloguing programme continued to advance: three further fascicles of descriptive text were published. These cover (1) Small Mouthpieces for Brass Instruments, (2) Large Mouthpieces for Brass Instruments, and (3) Saxophones. In addition to the printed editions, they have also been published electronically.
A list of all the instruments in the Collection has been published though the World-Wide Web consisting of 26 files briefly listing 2827 instruments and other objects in the Collection. These `Brief Lists' can be viewed at:-
Further information about the Collection can also be found at this website.
The Collection has benefitted from a programme of work undertaken by Darryl Martin with grant-aid funding from the Scottish Museums Council. This has resulted in improved display of over 100 instruments and improved storage facilities for many of the instruments not on display.
The Honorary Curator represented the University at the meeting of CIMCIM (the International Committee of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections) in Austria, Slovakia and Hungary.
The University has succeeded in attracting recurrent funding from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council for five years from October 1996. This is a contribution towards the University's expenditure on housing, insuring and staffing the Collection, and places EUCHMI in a comparable financial position to that of the Russell Collection.
A development plan and draft lottery funding application has been prepared for the University by Environment Development Consultants Ltd, with support from Lothian and Edinbugh Enterprise Ltd. This includes detailed consideration of the operation of the Collection together with the Russell Collection as a single museum in premises including St Cecilia's Hall, the purpose-built `Scandic' gallery in the Crowne Plaza Hotel and a re-built link building.
The Collection has been used for teaching purposes by University Staff, in particular for courses in the Faculty of Music on the History of Instruments, Ethnomusicology and Musical Acoustics. Several parties including school and college groups have made organised visits, and various scholars and instrument makers have visited to study particular instruments.
Arnold Myers, 31st December 1996
[ Report for 1997 ] [ Report for 1995 ]
© Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, 1996.
This article was re-published on 23 December 2022