Hornbostel–Sachs

Hornbostel–Sachs or Sachs–Hornbostel is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs. This system was first published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1914.[1] An English translation was published in the Galpin Society Journal in 1961, which is the most widely used system for classifying musical instruments by ethnomusicologists and organologists (people who study musical instruments). The system was updated in 2011 as part of the work of the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) Project.[2]

Hornbostel and Sachs based their ideas on a system devised in the late 19th century by Victor-Charles Mahillon, the curator of musical instruments at Brussels Conservatory. Mahillon divided instruments into four broad categories according to the nature of the sound-producing material: an air column; string; membrane; and body of the instrument. From this basis, Hornbostel and Sachs expanded Mahillon's system to make it possible to classify any instrument from any culture.

Formally, the Hornbostel–Sachs is modeled on the Dewey Decimal Classification for libraries. It has five top-level classifications, with several levels below those, adding up to over 300 basic categories in total.

  1. ^ Volume 46 (1914) of the Zeitschrift is available online in a variety of formats, as part of the digital collection of the University of Toronto. The article by Hornbostel and Sachs is to be found on pages 553–90.
  2. ^ Evénement. "MIMO Project – Musical Instrument Museums Online". Mimo-international.com. Retrieved 2018-11-20.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.