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30 Years After - Towards a New Permanent Exhibition of Musical Instruments in the Germanisches NationalmuseumFrank P. Bär
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In fact, mass-media as an omnipresent source of information and amusement have changed the habits of almost everyone, including people who are likely to visit a museum. The position of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum's musical instrument collection as a department in a general museum of art and culture (unlike a specialized musical instrument museum on its own) raises the question of the profile of the typical individual visitor.
Possible solutions how to serve the different kinds of visitors in this type of museum will be discussed.
Musical Instrument Building and the Prague CollectionBohuslav Cízek
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From the 16th century many instruments were imported from Germany, specially Nürnberg. Some of these are kept in the collection of the National Museum for Czech Music in Prague. For example the windcap shawms (Rauschpfeifen) and bombards (Pumort) in the consort of the Rozmberk court ensemble are signed by Anton Schnitzer, the unique extended great bass zink was made by Jörg Wier (II) from Memmingen.
From the Nürnberg workshops the Prague collection owns trumpets (Langtrompeten) by J.L. Ehe, Magnus Ehe, Vogel and Schmidt and trombones signed by Nagel, Starck, Haas and others. The collection of renaissance and baroque lutes is remarkable.
Musical instruments made by famous makers like Laux Maler, Max Unverdorben, Magnus Tieffenbrucker and others belong to the Lobkowic collection and delegates to the CIMCIM meeting in September 2000 can visit this collection at Nelahozeves castle, not far from Prague. Some violins signed Jacob Stainer - one from 1676 and proven to be authentic - are exhibited there as well. An outstanding consort of six baroque trumpets by Michael Leichamschneider from 1716 attracts the visitors attention.
The precious violin with inlaid work by Nicolo Amati, and other violins by Stradivari, Peter and Giuseppe del Gesù, Testore and other masters from the German and French school are exhibited in the National Museum. There you also find the woodwind instruments by masters from Leipzig and Dresden and two recorders by Peter (Pu I) Bressan, London.
For the foreign visitor the works of the regional masters will be of interest in Prague: for example two guitars by Andreas Ott (Oth) from the 17th century. By the end of that century more instrument builders settle in Prague, mainly with southern German origin. They laid the foundation-stone for the fame of the Prague violin making school: Thomás Edlinger (1662-1729), Joannes Udalricus Eberle (1699-1768), Joannes Georgius Hellmer (1687-1770) and others. Amongst them were also Tomas Hulínský (Prague, 1731-1788), Kaspar Strnad, Bubeník and than in the 19th century Homolka, Dvorák and other masters like Kulík or Sitt. Eberle and Hulínský built the most precious Viola d'amore with carved heads.
Woodwind building in Bohemia in the 18th century remains a little bit below the European level, but never the less one can find extraordinary masters like J. Fridrich (first third of the century) and Frantisek Doljes (third third of the century). They are known for their basetthorns, oboes and clarinets.
High quality brass instruments from the late 18th century throughout the 19th century are made by the Prague families Bauer, Wolf and others and also in Kraslice (Graslitz). The highlights here are instruments by Václav Cervený from Koeniggraetz and the inventions by Josef Sedivý, Odessa.
Just as German masters influenced the lute and violin making in Prague in the beginning of the 18th century, hundred years later German instrument builders also contributed in the unfolding of organ and piano building. Michael Weiss (1764-1838) and Jacob Weimes (1767-1830) are to be mentioned specially. Builders like Kratochvíl from Jindrichuv or Dohnal never reached their quality. The preserved instruments and also the outstanding work of the Viennese J.J. Seydels are shown in the long-term exhibition in honour of the 300th anniversary of the Hammerklavier in Zdar at the Sázava.
The Applied Arts Museum of the Republic of UzbekistanTatyana Fomina
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The musical art of Uzbekistan has been developed over the ages. The artistic miniature of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries and the classical eastern poetry and prose of Firdouse, Navoi give extensive evidence of the existence at that time of all the major types of instruments that are still used in Uzbekistan. Time has also altered the forms of musical instruments. Researchers working in the field of world musical culture have time and again noted the diversity and rich sounding of Uzbek national instruments.
Uzbek national instruments belong to the category of percussion: doira, nagora, wind musical instruments: nai, surnai and karnai, string instruments: dutar, rubab, tambur, kashgar, bowed instruments: sato, gidjak. The methods of their decoration are also extremely diverse. Great importance is attached to the ornamentation of musical instrument since the artistic finishing of instrument affects its sounding. Uzbek musical instruments are inlaid with metal, bone, mother-of-pearl, wood and also decorated with carved and painted ornaments. Ancient cities such as Khorezm, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Kokand are famous for their art of artistic decoration of musical instruments.
The Tashkent Factory of Musical instruments is the biggest in Central Asia. It produces a large number of instruments. They are of beech and fir-tree. Chiseling is replaced by gluing some wooden elements decorated with figured turning and carving. Masters S. and M. Mirzaevs make these instruments of mulberry wood and richly decorate them with bone encrustation. Master B. Aminov is one of the craftsmen who make the folk musical instruments. The master specializes in the stringed and bowed instruments making like rubab and dutar. He follows those artistic principles of traditional musical instrument fabrication that have developed during the twentieth century. He creates wonderful instruments from mulberry, elm, walnut, apricot, beech and pear trees. The traditional musical instruments of Uzbekistan still have their direct functional meaning.
Musical Instruments at the Bern Historical Museum Reflecting the Musical Culture of the City and Canton of BernBrigitte Bachmann-Geiser
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The Bernese Historical Museum in Bern, Switzerland, founded in 1894, is known for its collections of flemish tapistries. Nobody visits the museum to see musical instruments.
There are more than one thousand of ethnomusicological instruments, however, which are stored together with all the other objects of this department according to the continents they come from. These musical instruments have been little studied. There are two articles written about them and a small catalogue. There is another collection of 250 musical instruments belonging to the historical department, which is not looked after and which has never been enlarged systematically. It grew more or less by chance over more than one hundred years. 20% of these objects were bought, 10% of them are on loan, and the main part, 70% of all these musical instruments, have been given to the museum by people of the town and of the canton of Bern. These gifts reflect the musical life of the nobility, the bourgeoisie of Bern as well as rural musical tradition.
These documents of Bernese cultural history represent the powerful mighty state which, before 1815, was the biggest north of the Alps and included the Swiss midlands between the Rhine and Lake Geneva. Bern's military power is shown by 16 old drums, the oldest of them dated 1615.
As generals of Swiss soldiers in foreign countries, the noblemen of Bern enlarged their horizons. They learned to buy a horn from Michael Leichamschneider in Vienna or had a harpsicord made by Johann Ludwig Hehlen in Bern.
In the Reformed Church of Switzerland, music was forbidden in the 16th century. However, the city of Bern re-introduced church song in 1572, and had it accompanied at first by trombones and in the 18th century by the basse de musette, a double-reed instrument known only in the reformed church of the canton of Bern. There are 6 basses de musette and 8 bassoons d'amore to be found in the Berne collection!
The biggest farming canton of Switzerland, Bern, is known by its traditional arts, including folkmusical instruments. Citterns, dulcimers and alphorns reflect the traditional music of Bern.
A catalogue raisonné by Brigitte Bachmann-Geiser with more than 300 printed pages and 400 pictures will appear in 2001.
Museum of Instruments in Poland and their Relationship with Instrument MakingAlicja Knast |
An important moment in the history of the Museum of Musical Instruments in Poznan was the initiative of organizing the "International Henryk Wieniawski Violinmakers", first held in 1957, complementing the international competition for violinists. The tradition of Polish violin making in the in 17th and 18th centuries was both a pretext and a stimulus to this contest. Zdzislaw Szulc, the author of the debatable hypothesis concerning Polish genesis of the violin, and his follower, Wlodzimierz Kaminski, both curators Museum of Musical Instruments in the museum, ensured attention was paid to the historical aspects.
Thanks to Kaminski, in 1978 the Department of Violin Making was created in the Music Academy in Poznan. Its students were able to study the craft in detail, drawing on Kaminski's experience gained through work for the museum.
The existence of the piano factories of Arnold Fibiger, Teodor Betting, and the Apollo factory in Kalisz was the basis for the creation in 1981 of a collection of pianos in the Museum of Industrial History at Opatówek near Kalisz. The school for piano makers and tuners in Kalisz thus has a collection which is a perfect teaching-aid in studying 19th and 20th instruments.
The Museum of Musical Instruments in Poznan also holds folk and amateur instruments. Every year there are meetings of makers of the bagpipes typical for folk music in the Wielkopolska region. These meetings aim at raising standards, introducing the instrument makers to traditional ways of building bagpipes, and explaining the former aesthetic of bagpipe sound. There have been plans so that not only would the museum be an inspiration for makers, but also that the makers might offer instruments to the museum in future.
We would like to organize a kind of "Festival of Copies", of reconstructions of the of the Hass clavichord in our collection in its original state. Research has shown that it has been repainted at least four times, as well as some undergoing some structural changes
It seems that exchanges between the craft and the musem are inevitable for the development of each.
Fabrication of Musical Instruments in St Petersburg in the 18th Century and Museum of Musical InstrumentsVladimir Koshelev |
The aspect relating to a very subtle kind of connection between the instrument maker and the instrument is being studied actively by scientists of various countries. Such phenomena as facsimile editions of early treatises on various instruments, societies researching some instrument and everything connecting with it etc., may serve as an example.
The aspect relating to a connection between the instrument making and the instrument collecting is being studied as well, but not so actively.
The Russian musicology and museology are not much interested in this aspect. Data concerning instrument making in 18th century and collecting of musical instruments in general have been collected, but to a very limited extent. The authors of these works did not consider the instrument making in Russia, not to mention St Petersburg, in the 18th century, as an object of research and used their data only as illustrations, and did not consider the instrument collecting at all. Such an approach to instrument making and collecting is determined 1) by the scantity of sources of information. Musical instrument makers and collectors in general, and those of St Petersburg in particular, wrote about their creative activity only with a view to make publicity (some treatises by violin makers and some catalogues are an exception). 2) A musical instrument making and collecting as an objects of research are extremely complicated.
Such are the reasons for which the Russian instrument making and collecting in general and in St Petersburg in particular remains unresearched.
What, then, was the Russian instrument making? Its level 2000 years ago may be appreciated to some extent by the flute found during archeological excavation near Ryazan (flute is now in Museum of musical instruments). The period of the 10th-14th centuries is illustrated by unique collection of Russian instruments called gusli, gudki, sopeli, rojki, jewish harps etc., excavated in Novgorod (some copies are in Museum). The period of the 15th-17th centuries has already some names of instrument makers. They were almost all organ makers come from abroad who, after working in Moscow, left some Russian pupils there. Of course their instruments have not survived. So the tradition of importing foreign instrument makers has existed in Russia for a very long time. After the foundation of St Petersburg (1703) this tradition received a new powerful impetus. In the course of 18th-19th centuries the St Petersburg market was flooded with musical instruments. There were workshops and small factories specializing in production of various instruments.
Let us try to delineate roughly the situation in this field of knowledge that existed in St Petersburg. We must first of all warn that this is the first attempt at research in this field. The main information used was the newspaper "Sankt-Petersburgskiye Vedomosti" of 18th century (Saint-Petersburg Reports) as well some archives materials and publications. The main part of this information will be published for the first time.
The information contained in the newspaper has its peculiarities: it consists of publicity ads of various instrument makers and numerous different terms for the same kind of instrument. The newspaper gives an opportunity of learning the construction of instruments, the instrument makers names, their addresses, activity and specialization. We can learn reading the Vedomosti what kind of instrument was most popular, what instruments were exhibited for the public, what the country was that produced the most esteemed instruments. As a result we have been able to put up a list including 58 names of instrument makers and to compose an index containing variants of terms for different wind, string, mechanical and percussion instruments (total number more than 1000).
Using this data we may come to the following conclusions: in St Petersburg keyboard instruments enjoyed the greatest popularity absolutely: clavichords and harpsichords in the first half of the 18th century, piano (first of all "square" and then "grand") and claviorgan ("piano with flutes") in the second half of the 18th century. Among pianos the instruments - so called "English pianos" - were most appreciated. Pianos were produced of different size: from the ones "you can carry with you in a coach" to the big ones. Organs and various mechanical instruments were popular too.
A lot of inventions were made. Some may be mentioned, for instance, horn orchestra by I. Maresh, horn with valves by F. Kölbel etc. So the information about the instrument making and their makers is available in two forms: either as a concise advertisement or a detailed description of instrument with a lot of terms in Russian for each instrument (it is special, very interesting and topical field). For instance:-
A serious collecting of musical instruments was beginning also at 18th century. It was going step by step to the opening of Museum of musical instruments at 1900 in St Petersburg. So, Museum was opened because instrument making was existed, and we know something about instrument making, for instance, at 18th century, because Museum exists now. It seems to us very important to research this connection.
The aim of my report is co-operation. It may be that the names of the makers will allow identification of anonymous instruments kept in European museums. It may be that scanty information about a maker will throw additional light on his activity. Moreover I hope if my European colleagues will assist me in the research undertaken, to elucidate the question of what the nationality of the makers who were coming to St Petersburg was, how high their professional level, and what they expected to get there.
The oldest preserved violas of the Graslitz/Vogtland violin making traditionKlaus Martius |
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| Preservation of African Traditional Instruments: an Interactive Approach Jesmael Mataga |
The paper stipulates that the problem faced by museums is insufficient efforts to preserve both the art and the form of traditional music and instrument making. Some of the identified problems include the changing cultural values, lack of training and insufficient resources. There is also the problem of the musical and preservation specialists working separately and independent of each other thereby creating gaps in preservation of the music, the art of making instruments as well as physical conservation of already made pieces.The artists who are specialists in the art of making and playing the traditional instruments are still within the confines of the larger community. Institutions that specialise in study and analysis have worked independent of institutions that are specialists in documentation and conservation. This kind of approach has created gaps. Museums have collected and documented some of traditional instruments, but have been found lacking in preserving the art of instrument making or playing, which the musicological institutions can assist together with the community. There has been lack of a global approach to preservation of traditional instruments. Museums have acted mainly as repositories of traditional musical instruments whilst expert musicologists have concentrated on studying the forms without preserving the instruments.
The paper therefore discusses these problems and suggests an interactive approach and cooperation between these institutions and the community. Whilst the observations made mainly apply to the situation in Zimbabwe, the same can be said of the whole southern African sub-region.
Musical Instrument Collection and Musical Instrument-Making: Interaction in History and in the FutureSisir Kumar Mukherjee
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Many museums, either in the East and the West, which preserve multi-disciplinary objects, are seldom to project the musical instruments in separate sections. Viewers are to find the musical instruments from the paintings, which contain them. Sculptures in stone and terracotta to show musical instruments, along with the icons. But lack of proper documentation can seldom help the viewers to find out the instruments.
In rare cases, musical instruments are highlighted in the museums, as few museums have any separate gallery, exclusively to display the instruments. The Indian Museum in Calcutta, India, is one of such rare examples to display instruments in the musical gallery. But there too, many things remain untold. Display of musical instruments of Indian origin, deserve to be rectified, according to the norms of Bharata's "atyasastra". The corresponding labels also have to be placed nearer to the viewers.
The sculpture exhibition, viz. "Gathering Rites", held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1986 and the demonstration of concerts with other musical events in West Berlin in 1988 on the occasion of the International Harp Week, bear evidences to the concept of musical-instrument making. The demonstration of the pipes, as held in 1994 at the Chantry Bagpipe Museum at Morpeth, all bear evidences to be followed by other museums, which preserve such instruments.
Musical Instrument Collecting and Musical Instrument-MakingKlára Radnóti |
The collection has grown first of all by donations, (e.g. the harp of Marie Antoinette, the cembalo of the Emperor Joseph II, etc,)
In 1887, the bequest of Ferenc Liszt became the part of the collection including the Broadwood piano (1817) of Ludwig van Beethoven.
1902, the bequest (legacy) of the Hungarian painter and private collector István Delhacs consisted of about 50 old musical instruments, many from Italy and Germany.
The interest of Hungarian Instrument makers started to focus on the collection of the Hungarian National Museum in the 20th century. In 1927, the company Schunda made a donation of rare examples of 19th century Hungarian instruments to the Hungarian National Museum. The family Schunda founded its firm in 1848 in Budapest. The most prominent member of the family, Vencel József Schunda invented a new type of tárogató and also the pedal cimbalom (1872).
A significant milestone was passed in 1957, when the separate department of musical instruments was established in the Hungarian National Museum with the objective of collecting significant exampless owned by Hungarian historical personalities and/or produced by Hungarian craft makers. Documents of Hungarian instrument making are collected by other departments of the Hungarian National Museum, e.g. the violins and craft tools of József Bohák, a Hungarian violin maker, are held in the Musical Instrument Collection whereas his certificates, documents, musical printouts are to be found in the Document Collection.
In March 2001 the exhibition Symphonia Hungarorum: 1000 Years History of Hungarian Music will be opened in Buda Castle, where Hungarian National Museum will show the history of Hungarian instrument making as well. Planning of the exhibition is in progress.
The reconstruction of the "Quintetto Mediceo" by Antonio Stradivari (1690)Gabriele Rossi-Rognoni |
The Galleria dell'Accademia is promoting a project, to be finished by the first half of 2001, of reconstruction of the whole quintet in its original form on the basis of strict historical, documentary, and scientific evidence. The reconstruction is based on the data drawn from historical and more recent documents and studies, original drawings and moulds used by Stradivarius and most of all on the results of a series of scientific exams (UV photos, X-rays, computerized tomography (TC), endoscopy, dendrochronology, dendrological analysis) conducted on the instruments preserved. The aim is a reconstruction not only of the aesthetic aspect, but also of the technical and constructive ones and all those which have a direct influence on the sound of the instrument.
The replicas will be made by six violin makers (one for each instrument and one for the varnish), selected for their competence in the field of early musical instrument making. The scientific reliability and homogeneity of the result is guaranteed by a scientific committee formed by John Henry van der Meer, Annalisa Bini (curator of musical instruments of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome), Renato Meucci (professor of organology at the Univ. of Parma), Gabriele Rossi-Rognoni (scientific consultant of the Galleria dell'Accademia), Virginia Villa (director of the Civic School of violin making of Milan) and Andrea Mosconi (curator of bowed instruments of the city of Cremona).
The result of the project will either broaden our knowledge in the field of replicas (especially in relation to instruments now preserved in definitely different conditions) and show what role can a museum have as a deposit of knowledge useful and necessary to the study and reconstruction of early instruments.
It will be possible to show the results accomplished (all the preliminary surveys will be finished before September) and to describe the criteria adopted.
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