And therein lies the museum dilemma. You simply cannot satisfy all
requirements.
Unfortunately I've seen far too many instruments in cases that had
been through hands that knew nothing about the instrument in question,
so even the “don’t restore” ideal was blown. One time I saw some reed
pipes (launeddas-type things) in a museum where the reed had been
inserted into the wrong end of the body by museum staff. I tried to
tell a curator and got the response that they only conserve, not
restore, and that that represents how they got the instrument. Fair
enough, but when it comes to outright errors, they should fix them. In
this case they were conveying incorrect information because of their
policy (and I think that someone on the museum staff was responsible
for the error in this case: the staff simply guessed at how the thing
should have been put together).
I tend to agree more with the perspective that says that the
instruments should be played/restored, but realize that there are
cases when doing so would result in real problems. In general, if you
want the kinds of information that Simon wants, I think the best way
to handle it is to do a very careful acquisition survey of the
instrument, complete with detailed, high-resolution images from many
angles. That way you can preserve a lot of the information. And now
with the beginnings of 3D scan technology, you could actually build
better images than what someone looking at the thing could get.
Another part of the problem is that very often there is a tendency to
present "typical" instruments (i.e., the ancestors of common European
art instruments) very nicely, cleaned up and looking pristine, while
“folk” instruments (both old and modern) are presented as piles of
dusty, mouldering wood. Unless something has changed since I last
looked, the HGs in one very prominent US museum look about like piles
of scrap material and, if I remember correctly, in at least one case
the instrument was simply set up wrong, in a way that no player would
have done it. They hadn't even bothered to blow the dust off the
instrument! So what was preserved is what some person ignorant of the
instrument did after the fact without even a gentle dusting. What
message does it send about these instruments when some are beautiful
and others (equally beautiful in their time) are presented as so much
waste in the evolutionary tree that culminates in violins, guitars,
and a few select other instruments?
-Arle
On Jun 4, 2008, at 5:15 AM, Simon Wascher wrote:
having an untouched and unrestored instrument is a very rare and
very important source of information:
From the acctual Colson one can for example learn, that the maker
had a way to create a very steady wheel and axle system, that "the
keys in the upper register were very floppy in the key slots" -
things you cannot learn from the restored instrument.
Sometimens even the frets are untouched, giving an idea of the
tuning system used 300 years ago - so even just making an instrument
playable by tuning it to todays taste might destroy a very rare and
important bit of information.
