[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I read what was behind your link to Sachs & Hornbostel.
Yet another entry I ought to revise then perhaps - if it gives the impression that I'm against the Sachs-Hornbostel system. Their classification system was really ground-breaking in its own time and we owe them a lot. The problem with it isn't that they did a poor job, it's the fact that they had to start on such a base level and there are limits to how far you can go in one step. > It is true that they > were looking for a way to categorise ANY instrument from ANYWHERE of > ANY EPOCH. I think one of the basic lessons that they teach is that > there are only a few possible ways of producing music - with > aerophones, chordophones, membranophones and ideophones (and, later, > electrophones). Every musical civilisation (and, let's face it, if it > hasn't got music, it's not a civilisation!) If it hasn't got music it isn't human. ;-) > from the dawn of time to the electronic age has had only those four > (later 5) types of sound producers to work with. Well, some - me included - would add the human voice as well but that's a rather trivial modification to the system. Even at the top level, Sachs-Hornbostel isn't quite as simple as you may think though. Take the aerophones for example. Strictly speaking only flute instruments fit S&B's definition. Reed instruments do not produce sound from a column of air but from one or more thin tongues (reeds) of metal, wood or other suitable material. The air column doesn't make the sound, it only alters it. The same applies to an even greater extent to what we call brass instrument. You might argue that brass instrument, like the trumpet, isn't technically a musical instrument since it doesn't actually produce any sound. It just amplifies and modifies the sound made by the player's lips. So if we were to take S&B's definitions literally, the clarinet would belong to the grab-bag ideophones category while the trumpet wouldn't be included at all. Speaking of ideophones - basically there are just two ways of producing sound: by manipulating the air directly or by causing vibrations to a physical object. Why are two types of physical objects - a piece of skin and a string - granted their own main categories while others aren't? Actually it makes sense to do so, since strings and membranes are such common objects for producing sound but it's still a subjective decision. Electrophones - somehow I feel Sachs and Hornbostel would have objected to that extra category. An electric circuit doesn't make any sound (except for hum caused by mechanical imperfection which would make it an ideophone). What actually *makes* the sound is the speaker, and a speaker fits nicely into the membranophones category. My inclusion of keyboard instruments as a separate category is of course based on popular perception. > It would be pretty wild to suggest that the two > sticks that Borneo cannibals knocked together were in some way > "related" (e.g. by import or imitation) to the two sticks that Matto > Grosso Indios knock together. It is indeed and that's why classifying instrument by their historical relationship is so dicey. Better to focus as much as possible on physical construction and not worry that much about who inspired who. > Let's take the chordophones, which are our babies. .. > Again, he found only a few feasible methods of doing this .. You may notice that although I haven't actually included the "lutes" as a main subcategory for stringed instruments (due to the risk of it being confused by the more specific lute family) the stringed instruments are sorter more or less according to S&B. One serious mistake I did make though, was to separate the chordophones into two main categories: plucked and bowed. It's such an obvious and popular concept but it doesn't really work in the long run. > Where Sachs got a bit eurocentric - and downright misleading, if > you're not careful - was in the naming of those four categories of > chordophones. category 1 above, he called "Harps", category 2, > "Lyres", category 3, "Zithers" and category 4, "Lutes". He used these > terms because they were the names of existing instruments belonging to > the respective category and familiar to European musicologists. Well, if I'm allowed a little bit of nastiness: The average 19th C. musicologist wasn't particularly bright, didn't know much about music and liked to think of himself as "better" than the common people. Basically he was just a sad looser (ab)using quasi-scientific arguments to explain why the music *he* liked was more worthy than other kinds of music. Sachs had to come up with names that musicologists understood and average people didn't and that narrowed down the options a lot. What fail to understand, is why he called category 3 "zithers" rather than - say "psalteries." The distinction between zithers and lutes was a bit problematic even at Sachs' time and even more so today. There are - and were - several "zithers" with frets attached *to* the body or - if you like - lutes with hollowed out necks functioning as resonators. Whether these should be regarded as zithers or lutes isn't always clear. > So let's look at the"Lutes", which is the category to which the > cittern belongs. .. > However, this is not an unambiguous specification of the renaissange > cittern; and there are many instruments that one might categorise the > same - some of them European or American, some Far Eastern! Ah, there you get right down to one of the most crucial points: It's often (I might even say usually) impossible to define a certain set of construction details that clearly defines one type of instruments as different from all others. In the end, there's no way to completely avoid "popular opinion" as a parameter. Here's an example (no need to discuss this in detail - it's just an illustration of the problem): Let's say we choose these parameters: + An instrument with a resonating body all along the string is a zither + An instrument with a bowled back is a lute + An instrument with a flat(ish) back and a fixed bridge is a guitar + An instrument with a flat(ish) back and a floating bridge is a cittern Seems reasonable, doesn't it ? A bit crude but remember it's just a simplified example. Now taking this literally means: + A Weissenborn guitar is a zither + An Ovation guitar is a lute + A flattop western guitar is a guitar + An archtop guitar is a cittern Now, that doesn't seem to make much sense! > Back to Sach's main lesson: The fact that two instruments share common > features can often be fully explained by the fact that there are so > many instruments in the world and so few possible ways of building > them. That's very true and I think I'd better repeat a point I've been trying to make all the time: My classification system draft is mainly based on the various instruments' construction features. I have taken "popular conception" and historical development into consideration but I'm trying my best to avoid it. When I talk about instruments being "related" to each other, I usually mean they're similar in construction, not that they're necessarily historically related. ------- One thing I didn't realize until now, is that nobody seems to have tried to make an instrument classification system as detailed as this one before. Maybe I should quit my job so I could find time to do it properly? The whole thing seems theoretical and useless enough to warrant some kind fo government or university grant... ;-) Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
