Erich von Hornbostel

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E. M. von Hornbostel

Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (25 February 1877 – 28 November 1935) was an Austrian

Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs
.

Life

Hornbostel was born in

Sachs–Hornbostel
system of musical instrument classification (published 1914).

In 1933, he was sacked from all his posts by the

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.[1]

Contributions

Hornbostel did much work in the field of ethnomusicology, then usually referred to as comparative musicology. In 1906, he was in America to study the music and psychology of the Pawnee people, Native Americans in the state of Oklahoma; he had by that time already studied the native music of Tunisia and of South Sea Islanders.[2]

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

Hornbostel also contributed to the theory of

binaural hearing, propose the theory of interaural time difference as the main cue, and developing sound localization devices (for finding the directions to artillery, aircraft, submarines, etc.) for the German war effort during World War I. With Max Wertheimer, he developed a directional listening device that they referred to as the Wertbostel.[3]

Selected works

References

  1. ^ Fritz Bose (1972), "Hornbostel, Erich M. von", Neue Deutsche Biographie (in German), vol. 9, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 633–634
  2. ^ James Mooney (1907). "Anthropological Miscellanea". American Anthropologist. 9. American Anthropological Association: 242.
    doi:10.1525/aa.1907.9.1.02a00240
    .
  3. ^ Mitchell G. Ash (1998). Gestalt psychology in German culture, 1890-1967: holism and the quest for objectivity. Cambridge University Press. pp. 188–190, 236–238.
    ISBN 978-0-521-64627-7
    .

External links
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