In the course of the year, the Collection has received by bequest of the former Dean of Music, John Fairbairn, an Austrian or northern Italian violin with bows by Voirin and Hill. The Collection has been given other items by Antonia Bunch, Maureen Danert with R.J. Rowley, Anne Macaulay and Isabel Shivas. A Legnano model guitar dated 1829 by Staufer of Vienna was purchased with assistance from the National Fund for Acquisitions, administered with Government funds by the National Museums of Scotland.
The cataloguing programme continued to advance: three further fascicles of descriptive text were published. These cover (1) Percussion instruments of Regional Cultures Worldwide, (2) Drums, and (3) Trumpets and Trombones (second edition). In addition to the printed editions, they have also been published electronically. Further pictures of collection instruments have been added to the Collection's website
bringing the total number of images freely available to 114 (of 119 instruments). The number of visitors to the Collection's website now exceeds 20,000 annually.
Three further technical drawings have been published, two of oboes prepared for the Collection by Tetsu Ito, and a new drawing of the guitar by Matteo Sellas prepared for the Collection by Darryl Martin. They bring the total number of individual workshop drawings on sale to 38.
A portfolio has been created of digitised recordings, with associated video files and still photographs, of a selection of some of instruments in the Collection. Six performers took part in the project. A pilot website "Historic Musical Instruments: the Demonstrations" has been made with recordings of seven of the instruments. This portfolio can form the core of a more ambitious website, of an educational video, or of kiosk installations in the galleries in the future.
The Collection is a partner in an international consortium with the Musée Instrumental, Brussels (Belgium), the Cité De Science et de l'Industrie, Paris (France), and the Musikinstrumentenmuseum der Universität Leipzig, which has won a substantial European Union grant under the Raphael Programme. The object is to create in each of the partners' museums a "Laboratoire du Son" consisting of interactive demonstrations of the basic acoustics of musical instruments. The four partners are developing the units in close co-operation to meet each other's requirements. In Edinburgh the development work is being undertaken in the acoustics laboratories in the Department of Physics and Astronomy under the supervision of Dr Murray Campbell and the Director/Curator; the hardware and software is being underaken by Dr Howard Wright.
The Director/Curator represented the University at the Triennial General Assembly of ICOM (The International Council of Museums) and the concurrent conference of CIMCIM (the International Committee of Musical Instrument Museums and Collections) in Melbourne.
A number of instruments were lent to create a special exhibition organised by the National Association of Percussion Teachers for their `Scottish Day of Percussion' at Livingston. The sackbut by Anton Schnitzer dated 1594 was lent to the University of Durham for an exhibition.
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. An increasing number of enquiries were answered, many by e-mail.
The Collection provided the greater part of the research resources for my thesis, successfully presented to the University for the degree of PhD in the course of this year.
Arnold Myers, Director and Curator, 31st December 1998
[ Report for 1999 ] [ Report for 1997 ]
© Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, 1998.
This article was re-published on 23 December 2022