Musical Instruments in an Ethnographic Museum

The following notes are not intended to advance a method of classification for a museum of extra-European musical instruments; rather, they detail the difficulties of a study related exclusively to musical instruments and ethnography. Ethnography necessarily involves the acknowledgment that no object of musical or sound production, however primitive, however formless it may seem, no instrument--whether essentially or accidentally musical-shall be excluded from methodical classification. Within such classification, percussive procedures on wooden chests or upon the earth itself are of no less importance than the melodic or polyphonic resources of the violin or guitar. It is to the travelers, missionaries, and ethnographers that the history of musical instruments owes its only detailed descriptions of objects and techniques that musicologists have ignored and continue to neglect through the same prejudice which leads art historians to reject expressions such as: Negro art, Indian art, or South Sea island art. We were, in the course of a partial examination of documents on the music of American and African Negroes from the sixteenth century to the present, unable to make use of concrete details from anything but travelogues.' Now, it is only on condition that nothing of a people's musical life be deemed unworthy of examination that we can consider a general study of instrumentmaking and scoring throughout history and the five continents, and, consequently, of auditory sensuality in its full range of fantasy. We do not claim, of course, that the intentions of the composers of the Choral Symphony's scherzo or The Rite of Spring will become clearer to us simply because we will have analyzed the Negro's modes of rhythmic drumming. Invariable elements do, however, lurk within all stages of musical culture; we should attend to the variety of their combinations, just as there is no word in a language which does not help us to decipher it

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