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Rethinking Musical Instrument Classification: Towards a Modular Approach to the Hornbostel-Sachs System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Stéphanie Weisser  and
Maarten Quanten
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Extract

In 1914, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs created a hierarchic ordering (macrotaxonomy) of all musical instruments, even though they (and many others after them, see Kartomi 1990 and 2001) pointed out the difficulty of developing a systematic classification of all musical instruments (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961:5). This conceptual framework implies that the classifier has to walk one and only one route in the process of classifying objects. This cut-off “tracing” cannot possibly encompass all the possible features that make an instrument what it is and inevitably eliminates several other essential qualities of the object.

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Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 43 , 2011 , pp. 122 - 146
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Copyright © 2011 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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