Veranstaltungs-Detailseite - Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung - Preußischer Kulturbesitz

At the turn of the twentieth century in Europe, collections of musical instruments flourished, bringing together Western art music alongside non-European, archaeological, and folk musical objects. The museum’s incorporation of musical objects from geographically or culturally distant traditions relegated them to the tail end of an evolutionary historical axis, framing them as undeveloped or childish precursors to Western music, which occupied the axis’s normative centre. This evolutionary teleology—shared across the human sciences—legitimized large-scale collecting practices, fuelled by anthropological anxieties surrounding cultural exhaustion allegedly produced by colonial expansion. Such anxieties materialized in the accumulation of both sound archives and musical instruments, supplying the raw material for the classificatory project of organology. This presentation examines the role of collectors operating within fragmented and often imperial contexts, arguing that their practices were instrumental in shaping the epistemological foundations of organology and, subsequently, of ethnomusicology in the aftermath of World War I.

Start 3 p.m.
Duration 60 minutes
Free admission

Access to the seminar room via the gate of the State Institute for Music Research. Link to Open Street Map.

Weiterführende Links

• Louis Petitjean CV
• SIM-Forschungskolloquium