1st Edition
European, British, and American Musical Instrument Collectors, 1850–1940
The contributors to this volume examine musical instrument collectors and their reasons and means for collecting: Who were they professionally and personally? Why did they collect musical instruments? How did they acquire their objects? What were their collecting criteria and aesthetics?
Following a critical introduction, two chapters on historically overlooked yet essential themes – provenance, and collecting in the context of colonialism – lay the foundation for nineteen chapters, each on an individual collector, telling personal and individual stories of collecting and collections. These narratives illuminate a rich contextual history, including the factors that shaped each collector’s acquisition and use of objects. Because many private collections later became the mainstay of institutional ones, this volume holds that it is essential to understand these collectors and historical collecting practices, in order to understand our museum collections today.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in material culture, collecting and museum studies, music history, and organology.
Introduction
1. Collecting African Musical Instruments during the Colonization Era. The case of the Congo
Maarten Couttenier et al.
2. Provenance and Instruments of the Violin Family
Carla Shapreau
3. From ‘Scoundrel’ to Professor: The legacy of John Donaldson (c. 1788–1865) and the founding of the University of Edinburgh’s musical instrument collection
Sarah Deters
4. Carl Engel (1818–1882): ‘The highest authority in Europe upon the development of musical instruments’
Gabriele Rossi Rognoni
5. ‘The rare museum of an artist and inventor’: Adolphe Sax’s (1814–1894) collection of musical instruments
Ignace De Keyser and Malou Haine
6. Alfred Hill (1862–1940) and Arthur Hill (1860–1939): Private collectors, public benefactors
Tom Wilder
7. César Charles Snoeck (1834–1898): Making the intangible, tangible
Ignace De Keyser
8. Daniel Sargent Pillsbury (1836–1902): First collector of American band instruments
Robert E. Eliason and Jeanine Head Miller
9. Collecting Musical Instruments – A Merchant’s Passion. The Rück family collection (c. 1880–1962)
Dominik von Roth, Linda Escherich, and Markus Zepf
10. Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown (1842–1918): A Herculean piece of work
Sally B. Brown and Jayson Kerr Dobney
11. Auguste Tolbecque's (1830–1919) Collection: A new aesthetic order and the experimental archeology of musical instruments
Jean-Michel Renard
12. Celebrating the Art of Musical-Instrument Making. The private collection of Victor-Charles Mahillon (1841–1924)
Ignace De Keyser and Saskia Willaert
13. Carl Claudius (1855–1931) and His Sound-chests
Madeleine Modin
14. ‘No Mere Assemblage of Musical Instruments’: The foundations of Arnold Dolmetsch’s (1858–1940) collection
Edmond Johnson
15. Dayton C. Miller (1866–1941), an American Collector of Flutes
Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford
16. George Henry Benton Fletcher (1866–1944), The Improbable Collector
Mimi S. Waitzman
17. Francis W. Galpin (1858–1945): The Canon and collector
Darcy Kuronen
18. Henry Ford (1863–1947): Gathering America’s musical past
Jeanine Head Miller and Robert E. Eliason
19. Fritz Wildhagen (1878–1956) – Painter, Collector, Aesthete
Annette Otterstedt and Klaus Martius
20. Evan Gorga (1865–1957): An extraordinary collector, his incredible collections, and their disastrous odyssey
Alessandra Palidda
21. Curt Sachs (1881–1959) as Head of the Collection of Musical Instruments in Berlin: Views and perspectives
Heike Fricke
Appendices
Biography
Christina Linsenmeyer is Associate Curator, Collection of Musical Instruments at Yale University.
