Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. “Objects, Meaning: Recent Work on the Study and Collection of Musical Instruments.” Galpin Society Journal 54 (May 2001): 219–232.ĭiscusses the meanings that instruments hold within the culture that produced them as opposed to the meanings of those instruments when taken out of their original context and put into museums and the like, causing implications for classification.ĭeVale, Sue Carole, ed. Dawe 2001, taking an alternative perspective, explores social and cultural philosophies surrounding the use of musical instruments.ĭawe, Kevin. Both sources arrange their categories hierarchically from the most general to the most specific, the most general level being grouped according to the type of vibrating material that generates the sound. His work was modified and enlarged in Hornbostel and Sachs 1914, a frequently cited source which introduced numerical categories for classifying instruments to avoid underlying connotations that lexical designations might possess. Victor-Charles Mahillon was curator of the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels at the time. The first system that seemed to have the potential of accommodating any instrument of the world, both ancient and modern, can be found in Mahillon 1893–1922. DeVale 1990 focuses on clarity and consistency of approach and offers a methodology for future research. Among the most useful are Kartomi 1990 and Kartomi 2001, which provide extensive investigations of the concepts and literature about classification from an ethnomusicological perspective. Very few sources could be considered as general overviews. Nevertheless, the mounting multiplicity of classification systems coming to light can provide an increasingly detailed basis for comparative research, with scholars having opportunities to identify points of intersection and points of difference between the systems themselves, the rationales behind each system, and areas of continuity and change within them. In reality however, no single system can hope to cover all of the world’s instruments for a variety of reasons: a system generally suits the purpose for which it has been created (for example, a European museum catalogue as opposed to an academic cross-cultural study) a system is a reflection of a classifier’s philosophical perspective which in turn is usually influenced by trends that are current within the cultural milieu of the time new instruments that are continually being found, developed, or invented may fall outside the parameters set by a classification scheme. A substantial number of sources have endeavored to create ever-more-exhaustive classification systems, often expanding or building on existing taxonomies. With the Internet becoming an effective and instantaneously accessible resource for scholarly materials, there has been a growing awareness of local methods of classifying information, either written or orally transmitted or both, about musical instruments of indigenous cultural groups.

Contemporary and subsequent theorists also sought to develop alternative models based on, for example, social function.

Hornbostel and Sachs in 1914 adopted Mahillon’s categories, with some modifications such replacing “autophones” with “idiophones,” as the basis for their system, which is arguably still the most widely used to this day in museological, musicological, and ethnomusicological contexts. The system sorts instruments, according to the vibrating matter creating the sound, into “autophones” (self-sounders), “membranophones” (stretched membranes), “chordophones” (stretched strings), and “aerophones” (columns of air). Victor-Charles Mahillon, basing his main categories on an ancient Indian model, established a standard classification system complete with terminology. The sphere of interest took scholarly shape with the emergence in the 19th century of “organology” as a multifaceted and developing discipline engaged with the scientific study of musical instruments, of which the classification aspect is an integral part. The number of texts relating to this sphere of interest is extensive, both historically and geographically, and includes ancient Chinese and Indian writings, historic European treatises, modern reference works and catalogues, and online databases. Order, in this case, is achieved by conceptually arranging the myriad of musical instruments in this world into identifiable categories. The classification of musical instruments, the oldest system of which dates back at least four millennia, is one of the many manifestations of the human need to bring order to chaos.

Tutari instrument sound classification