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Erich M(oritz) von Hornbostel

(b Vienna, 25 Feb 1877; d Cambridge, 28 Nov 1935). Austrian scholar. He studied under Mandyczewski, then turned to the sciences (Heidelberg and Vienna, 1895-1900). Moving to Berlin he took up experimental psychology and musicology and directed the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (1906-33). He was dismissed in 1933 and went to New York, then London. He was a pioneer in the application of concepts of acoustics, psychology and physiology to non-European musical cultures and thus in the establishment of ‘comparative musicology’. His many publications include the standard classification of instruments (with Sachs, 1914).



 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Erich Moritz von Hornbostel

(born Feb. 25, 1877, Vienna, Austria — died Nov. 28, 1935, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.) Austrian ethnomusicologist. Born into a musical family in Vienna, he was by his teens a skilled pianist and composer. After taking a doctorate in chemistry, he became involved in psychological research, and his studies of tonal perception were pioneering research in what would become the field of ethnomusicology. He helped establish the research program for the field and the methods used to carry it out, including field recordings. In 1912 he devised, with Curt Sachs, the cross-cultural system of classification of musical instruments that is still in use.

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Wikipedia: Erich von Hornbostel

Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (February 25, 1877 - November 28, 1935) was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs-Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs.

Hornbostel was born in Vienna into a musical family. He studied the piano, harmony and counterpoint as a child, but his PhD at the University of Vienna was in chemistry. He moved to Berlin, where he fell under the influence of Carl Stumpf and worked with him on musical psychology and psychoacoustics. He was Stumpf's assistant at the Berlin Psychological Institute, and when the archives of the Institute were used as the basis for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv , he became its first director. It was during his time there that he worked with Curt Sachs to produce the Sachs-Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification.

In 1933, he was sacked from all his posts by the Nazi Party because his mother was a Jew. He moved first to Switzerland, then the United States, and finally to Cambridge in England, where he worked on an archive of non-European folk music recordings. He died there in 1935.

Hornbostel did much work in the field of ethnomusicology. A highly regarded teacher, his students included American composer Henry Cowell. Hornbostel specialized in African and Asian music, making many recordings and developing a system that facilitated the transcription of non-Western music from recordings to paper. He saw the musical tunings used by various cultural groups as an essential element in determining their music's character, and did much work in comparing different tunings. A lot of this work has been criticized since, but in its time, this was a very rarely explored area. Hornbostel also argued that music should be a part of more general anthropological research.


 
 

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Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Erich von Hornbostel" Read more

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